Martijn Eickhoff new director NIOD
Martijn Eickhoff (1967) has been a senior researcher at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies since 2006. For the past two years, he has also held the endowed chair for archaeology and heritage of war and mass violence at the Groningen Institute of Archaeology (GIA) of Groningen University. He researches the history, cultural dimensions, and aftermath of large-scale violence and regime changes in Europe and Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on the spatial, material, and transnational aspects.
Politics, heritage, and violence
One of Eickhoff’s main research themes is the relationship between politics, heritage, and violence. With Marieke Bloembergen (KITLV), he investigated the transformations of archaeological sites in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia. In 2020, the resulting study The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia. A Cultural History (CUP) was published.
Eickhoff studied history at the University of Amsterdam and the Freie Universität in Berlin, and obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Amsterdam for his thesis on Dutch archaeology and the confrontation with National Socialism. In 2005-2006, he was a guest researcher at the Historical Institute of the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, where he researched scientific SS-Ahnenerbe expeditions in Eastern Europe. In 2007, Eickhoff presented the NIOD report In naam der wetenschap? P.J.W. Debye en zijn carrière in Nazi-Duitsland (‘In the name of science? P.J.W. Debye and his career in Nazi Germany’), which describes the administrative career of the Dutch Nobel Prize winner in the Third Reich.
Independence and decolonisation
In addition to his position at NIOD, Eickhoff is coordinator of Regional Studies, a joint project of Dutch and Indonesian historians that is part of the broader programme Independence, Decolonisation, Violence, and War in Indonesia, 1945-1950. From 2006 to 2015, he was affiliated with Radboud University Nijmegen as Assistant Professor of Cultural History.
KNAW President Sluiter about Frank van Vree
KNAW President Ineke Sluiter lauded Frank van Vree, the departing director, for his “intellectual and organisational leadership that has kept NIOD in top shape: a healthy and dynamic institute that conducts important historical research in the heart of society. I am also grateful for his national role in thinking about sensible and fair assessment criteria for research groups in the Humanities.”
For a more complete overview of Martijn Eickhoff's projects, publications, and additional positions, please visit https://www.niod.nl/nl/medewerker/martijn-eickhoff.