In 2014, the Gerda Henkel Foundation initiated a scholarship programme supporting young humanities scholars from Africa and Southeast Asia in honour of the foundation's founder, Lisa Maskell. It is the largest international support programme for PhD students in the history of the Foundation. The Lisa Maskell Fellowships aim to strengthen universities in the partner countries, to counter the outflow of qualified young scholars and to ensure the doctoral students enjoy excellent academic training.
In the following months, L.I.S.A. will publish interviews with the Lisa Maskell Fellows from Subsaharan Africa and from Southeast Asia, in which they will talk about their research projects as well as their experiences during their academic career and the Lisa Maskell fellowship.
This week, we welcome Riczar Belcena Fuentes from the Philippines. After graduating from the University of the Philippines, he started his PhD in Archeology with the thesis Island Adaptation and Maritime Interaction in Changing Environments from the Terminal Pleistocene to the Early Holocene: A Comparative Study of Prehistoric Technology in Northeastern Indonesia and the Philippines, for which he spent twelve months at the Eberhard-Karls University of Tübingen .