The Boekman Dissertation Prize is awarded every three years to the best Dutch PhD research on art, culture and society. The prize, consisting of € 10.000, is intended to publisize artistic and cultural research to a wide audience. To this end, the journal Boekman devotes one of its editions to the winning dissertation, the year following the presentation.

The prize is named after Emanuel Boekman. On June 6th 1939, he was the first person in the Netherlands to write his PhD thesis on the relationship between goverment and the arts.

Hanka Otte (University of Groningen) is the winner of the fourth Boekman Dissertation prize for art, culture and policy. Otte received her PhD in 2015 from her research Binding or bridging? About the relationship between art, cultural policy and social cohesion. Otte studied how art participation and social cohesion relate to each other and whether the government choose the right art participating instruments to promote this cohesion. She did this based on a study in seven municipalities in Drenthe.

The jury consisting of René Boomkens (University of Amsterdam), Quirijn van den Hoogen (University of Groningen), Philomeen Lelieveldt (Utrecht University), Vivian van Saaze (Maastricht University) and Kitty Zijlmans (Leiden University and chairman of the jury) chose the dissertation van Otte from 74 dissertations on the field of work of the Boekman Foundation as winner.

The other two nominees were Dr J. van Beurden – Treasures in trusted hands: negotiating the future of colonial cultural objects (VU, 2016) and dr. Th. van Dorsten – Mirrors in the making: culture, education, and the development of metacognition in early and middle childhood (4-10) (RUG, 2015).

All participating dissertations are included in the library collection.