Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS)

The project

This section contains information on:

Proposal
Training and supervision plan
Progress reviews
Structuring the project
The dissertation
Submission, examination, and defense
Suspension and early termination

Proposal

A research project starts with a proposal. The items listed below offer a starting point. Conventions vary and applicants should ask their prospective supervisors for guidance. Items 4 through 8, for instance, may well be rearranged or merged. At any rate, your proposal will contain elements such as the following:

A working title.
A research question, specified in several subquestions if necessary. Depending on the type of research, your research question may be accompanied by a hypothesis or a more generally worded indication of what you expect to find.
Background: a general introduction to the topic, aimed at an academic reader who is not a specialist in your field, in one or two paragraphs.
Your position vis-à-vis scholarship to date. What is the state of the field? How does your project relate to this? What is new about it? Will it make an original, significant contribution?
Information on your primary source material. Do you have access to this material or can you reasonably expect to gain access to it?
Your theoretical orientation. Thinkers, central concepts, critical engagement with theory to date?
Your methodological orientation. Which methods will you use, and how will they enable effective data collection and analysis of the kind that is needed to address the research question? Ethnography, interviews, archival research, excavation, specialist library work? GIS, statistics, (big) data mining? Visual analysis, textual analysis? Etc.
Reflection on possible limitations and problems, and how you will address these.
Reflection on the ethics of research. Depending on the project’s orientation as humanities or social science (or both), assessment of the ethical aspects of research is undertaken by review committees in the faculties of Humanities and Social Science.
Working titles of the dissertation’s chapters, with a brief outline of each chapter.
A work plan. What, when, where?
Funding needs and funding sources.
A list of works cited.
A brief CV appended to the proposal proper, including education and employment to date, publications, and other relevant information such as the names, affiliations, and contact details of minimally two referees.
A brief motivation, appended to the proposal proper. Why do you want to do this research at Leiden University (rather than elsewhere)?

In the case of employee positions in team projects, the call for applications will likely provide guidance on what is expected in the application.

Training and supervision plan

Within three months from the project’s start date, the candidate and their supervisors jointly draw up a training and supervision plan that is signed by the candidate, the supervisors, and the Academic Director and uploaded in LUCRIS/CONVERIS. This offers a reference point for progress reviews throughout the project.

This is a way to outline and/or adjust a road map for your project. In other words, it’s not just red tape but also a useful instrument foir reviewing where you stand. And in the process of asking questions, the form summarizes some important points about the program.

You will find the form at the top of this page.

Progress reviews

All candidates have annual progress reviews. For candidates with employee status, this review is the same thing as their formal work review (ROG). It is the supervisors’ responsibility to initiate the reviews, and to inform the Academic Director and the Graduate Studies Advisor of the results.

The first review takes place within nine months, entails an explicit go / no-go decision and involves a third member of staff, normally based in LIAS, as an 'outside' reviewer. If the candidate or the supervisors are no longer confident that the project will succeed, the candidate’s enrolment may be terminated. If the candidate and the supervisors feel the project is on track but the outside reviewer disagrees, the matter is referred to the Graduate Studies Advisor and the LIAS Academic Director. If all feel that the project is on track, this means that the candidate should normally be able to complete the project successfully and in timely fashion. (Subsequent reviews need not involve an outside reviewer, unless the candidate or the supervisors feel this is necessary.)

The decision to terminate enrolment is not taken lightly; and to begin with, at the pre-application stage, the prospective supervisors’ decision to support the project is not taken lightly. Supporting an application is an unequivocal expression of confidence in the applicant and the project, and a serious commitment to undertaking joint responsibility for its success. It entails a professional obligation on the part of the supervisors to discharge their responsibilities from the start – an obligation that holds for the candidate just as much. These are principled matters, but there are important practical considerations as well. For many candidates, for instance, embarking on PhD research means international relocation and considerable financial investment.

If the candidate feels that termination of the project is unjust, they can lodge an appeal with the Committee for Appeals and Objections.

A central component for assessment during the first review is turning the proposal into a prospectus; more on this below.

Structuring the project

In light of the diversity of scholarship undertaken in LIAS, there are no hard and fast rules for structuring projects. For example: for some, the actual research – meaning, the investigation that will lie at the heart of the project’s original contribution to scholarship — happens during fieldwork, usually requiring physical travel. For others, the actual research happens from behind a desk: literary analysis and interpretation, for instance, or research on subject matter that is in cyberspace. In other words, distinctions such as those between fieldwork and library work are far from absolute. This also holds for the distinction between ‘the actual research’ and the writing process. The following outline, then, is merely an example.

Year 1

University and LIAS welcome events
Draw up Training and Supervision Plan
Coursework (see below): Skills Seminar, Library training, Faculty seminar on academic integrity, one of the two LeidenGlobal courses (‘Discipline and Place’), annual LeidenGlobal workshop; any specialist courses
Revisit proposal as necessary to enable an effective literature review
By month 9: turn the proposal into a prospectus of 10.000 to 20.000 words that is built around a comprehensive literature review, clearly positions the project in the field, shows how it will make an original contribution, and sets the stage for doing the actual research; update the list of works cited
Outline the introductory chapter; the outline may be adjusted over time, and the actual narrative written in several steps during the project, or at a later stage altogether

Year 2

Start work on the actual research, involving fieldwork as applicable
Coursework: the other of the two LeidenGlobal courses (‘Methodologies in the Humanities and Social Sciences') annual LeidenGlobal workshop; any specialist courses
Draft two core chapters
Teaching: structural or guest lectures

Year 3

Continue work on the actual research, involving fieldwork as applicable
Draft remaining core chapters
Teaching: structural or guest lectures
Conference presentation
Write journal article based on one of the dissertation’s chapters
Annual LeidenGlobal workshop

Year 4

Complete and revise full manuscript
Prepare for the period after graduation; see under Beyond the PhD
Annual LeidenGlobal workshop

The dissertation

The items listed above, under Proposal, should provide a good sense of what to look for in dissertations by others, and help candidates to produce their own; but theory is one thing, and practice is another. Some general points to bear in mind:

There is much professional literature on academic writing and publishing (here are a couple of pointers), and candidates can learn from their supervisors and their peers, from reading the traditions in their field, and from doing coursework. At the same time, they will develop their own voice.
Some key notions are
- focus and structure, and a clear delineation of the project’s scope
- clarity, validity, and cogency of argument
- regard for matters of style, including economy of words
- regard for conventions (e.g. citation styles, etc).
The Doctorate Board sets the maximum length of the thesis at 100.000 words, and LIAS takes this to include notes and the bibliography, but not appendices. If the supervisors feel the project so requires, they may request an exemption from the Dean.
The dissertation need not be one’s life’s work. Any research project is theoretically infinite, but at some point the dissertation simply needs to be finished. In somewhat binary terms, it is fine if the dissertation is an expert report on expertly conducted research that is submitted to the gatekeepers of the profession, as distinct from the book it may subsequently be turned into in order to contribute to scholarly discourse in the public domain, usually after substantial revision. Then again, these are highly individual matters; and some experts hold that dissertations should be written as books from the start.
PhD candidates at Leiden University may write their dissertation in Dutch or English. To write it in another language, the candidate needs permission from the Doctorate Board. Requests for permission should be addressed to the Dean of Humanities.

Submission, examination, and defense

The candidate submits the dissertation to the supervisors. Once the supervisors have approved the manuscript, the promotor asks the Dean to establish an examination committee. The committee is chaired by the Dean and has minimally three other members, minimally two of whom are based outside the Faculty of Humanities, with due regard for gender balance. The supervisors cannot be members of the committee. Within six weeks, the committee determines whether the dissertation is suitable for public defense. Once the candidate is admitted to the defense, they contact the Yeoman Beadle’s office for a date, normally within the next two months. The defense entails a 45‑minute, public oral examination by the committee, for which the committee may be enlarged with additional members. For full detail, see under PhD regulations and protocol.

Suspension and early termination

In exceptional circumstances, the Academic Director may ask that the Graduate School office suspend the candidate’s enrolment until such time as the project may be continued with a fair chance of success.

Early termination of the project may occur following a no-go decision in year one or an assessment of insufficient progress during subsequent progress reviews; or at any other time, if, after due consultation with the Graduate Studies Advisor and the LIAS Academic Director, the candidate or the supervisors are no longer confident that the project will succeed.

As noted above, if the candidate feels that termination of the project is unjust, they can lodge an appeal with the Committee for Appeals and Objections.