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Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR) AIHR

Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen awarded Veni grant for Creating Green Worlds-project

28 August 2026

NWO has awarded Veni grants to 29 talented researchers at the UvA and Amsterdam UMC (location AMC). Their projects cover a wide range of topics, including the role of exotic seagrass in carbon storage, gene therapy for blood disorders, the impact of AI-generated influencers on young adults’ body image, interventions to promote more sustainable and healthier eating habits, and the challenges of digital evidence in international criminal law.

Former Vossius-fellow Dr Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen received a Veni grant for the following project: Creating Green Worlds: Constructing Horticultural Knowledge and Expertise in the Dutch Republic (1600–1800)
Dutch excellence in horticulture has been renowned worldwide since the seventeenth century, altering local environments to cultivate plants introduced from all over the world. Considering horticulture as an epistemic domain, this project investigates how such horticultural knowledge and expertise was constructed in the early modern Dutch Republic. It examines how the interactions of hands-on practices, formalised knowledge, and the environments formed and shaped the expertise. Though analysing horticultural texts and images and implementing digital methods as a thinking tool, this research demonstrates the various processes of horticultural knowledge production, offering a unique historical perspective into Dutch green heritage.