Annachiara Raia awarded Vidi grant

Congratulations to Annachiara Raia, who has been awarded a Vidi grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). With this grant, Raia will be able to develop the research project 'Insularchives: Enduring narratives across distant-water islands'.

Raia's project studies narrative migrations that cross geopolitical borders and forge intertextual-and-religious relations among islanders of three distant-water Indian Ocean islands: Lamu, Madagascar, and Java.

Focusing on the 3000-years-old wandering story of Joseph – يوسف –   יוֹסֵף  and other stories circulating amid the islands, the project examines how stories travel, are re-enacted and shaped by their places of production and preservation. By connecting these textual cultures – digitally and on site –the project reveals how, despite island collections’ vulnerability to fragmentation and loss, these stories endure and function as ethical, pedagogical, and cosmological tools through which communities interpret the world, its histories, and human behaviour.

Annachiara has been awarded the Vidi grant within the SGW/SSH Cultural Sciences and Linguistics panel of the NWO Talent Programme 2025. 

Read more about all Leiden Vidi grant winners.

Photo credits: Javanese Carita Yusup (19th c., palm-leaf manuscript). First two leaves of the second manuscript of Carita Yusup British Library, Or.16914, ff.1-2 (detail).  
And: Swahili Qiṣṣati Yūsufu in Arabic script, on paper, black and colored ink red ink. Lamu, Kenya, 1937 AD. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Hs. Or. 9893 (Dammann 1993, 166– 167, no. 375).