Corinne Hofman - Biography#
Corinne Hofman is professor of Caribbean Archaeology and director of the Caribbean Research Group at Leiden University, the largest of its kind worldwide. After obtaining a BA degree in art history and archaeology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB), she completed her MA in pre-Columbian archaeology at Leiden University in 1987. Her MA research concentrated on the archaeology of Saba, Dutch Caribbean. Continuing her archaeological research on Saba during her PhD, she wrote her dissertation on the ceramic development of pre-Columbian Saba from a stylistic, morphological and technological perspective. Since then her focus in research and teaching is on the archaeology and indigenous history of the Caribbean.
Over the last three decennia Hofman has conducted fieldwork throughout the Caribbean which included excavations on Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Martin, Antigua (Long Island), Guadeloupe, Dominica, St. Lucia, Martinique, St. Vincent, Grenada, Curaçao, and the Dominican Republic. Her research is highly multi-disciplinary and her interests lie in settlement archaeology, artefact analyses, provenance studies, bioarchaeological investigations, network science, and ethnohistoric and ethnographic studies.
Since 1998, Hofman has obtained numerous prestigious research grants, amongst which an ASPASIA-grant (2003-2008) from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), a VIDI-grant (2004-2009), and a VICI-grant (2008-2013), both from the NWO Innovational Research Incentives Scheme. The main research themes pursued and developed throughout these multi-disciplinary projects are Socio-political Organisation, Settlement Patterns and Mobility and Exchange. Hofman’s projects are designed to contribute to the historical awareness and valorisation of archaeological heritage in the culturally and geopolitically diverse islandscape of the Caribbean.
In 2012 and 2013, Hofman was awarded a NWO open competition grant entitled “Island Networks: modeling inter-community social relationships in the Lesser Antilles across the historical divide (AD 1000-1800)”, an HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) grant entitled “CARIB: Caribbean encounters in a New World Setting´ and the highly prestigious ERC Synergy grant “Nexus 1492: New World Encounters in a Globalising World”, http://www.nexus1492.eu

Since September 2013 Hofman is Dean of the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University.