Dr Karel Innemée about his motivation to apply for POLONEZ BIS fellowship
We are beginning a cycle of interviews with participants of the POLONEZ BIS program. This time we are going to talk about how they evaluate their ongoing experience with the program.
We are excited to present our first interviewee Dr. Karel Innemée- researcher participating in the POLONEZ BIS fellowship program. Let’s delve deeper into Dr. Karel’s insights as he shares his opinion and experience with the program.
Dr Karel Innemée – source private archive
Where do you come from and what made you decide to apply for the POLONEZ BIS program?
Holland. While studying in Holland, I was invited to join Polish excavation in Sudan. So, In the following seasons, 1981, 1982, and 1983, I joined this Polish Excavation in Sudan. During one of these seasons, I was advised to choose a topic for my Ph.D. and analyse the aspect of paintings that nobody had worked on before- bishop’s costumes. I chose it as a topic for my Ph.D. thesis.
After some time, I wasn’t working in Nubia, Sudan, but mostly in Egypt and I was still in contact with my Polish colleagues. I decided ‘’to take my Ph.D. thesis from the shelf’’ and thought this could have been so much better. At that time, I was in contact with another Polish colleague who wrote his Ph.D. thesis about royal costumes from Nubia. So, we decided to start a project that is going to be a follow-up of both of our Ph.D. theses. This is how I decided to apply for funding for our research in the frame of the POLONEZ BIS programme.
In your opinion, was the recruitment procedure for the fellowship difficult and demanding and what was the biggest challenge for you?
In this case, I already had the experience of applying for similar programs previously and knew what kind of details to pay attention to. Of course, it depends on the reviewers, and in our case, the reviewers were quite positive. So, everything went quite smoothly, as I was already experienced in writing such a project.
The challenge was that my colleague and I had to explain why we had picked up the research question from such a long time ago. So, we wanted to renew the research. We needed to convince people that we wanted to make a follow-up of something we both did years ago for our Ph.D. theses. It wasn’t a problem, but it was something we were seriously thinking about, as I always think that research should serve a purpose. If you are doing research out of curiosity, it means you are wasting community money. It should have relevance to something. In our case, we were trying to show that it can also be interesting for people from other fields as well.
Taking into account your POLONEZ BIS experience so far of participating, would you recommend it to other researchers from abroad? Why?
Certainly, I would recommend it. It’s an opportunity to realise your research. The idea of being a member of the European Union and cooperating with other European Union countries, is very much alive in Poland. In Holland, though it’s also a European Union country, it’s not an exciting idea. Here, you can see that people are really eager to build these contacts with other European countries. That makes the program a nice opportunity for people from other countries.
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This was a first part of our chat with Karel🙂
