Daily Archives: 23 May 2017

Newcastle University: Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship in Medieval and Early Modern Studies – Call For Applications

The Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) research group at Newcastle University (http://research.ncl.ac.uk/mems) invites expressions of interest from eligible researchers seeking to apply to the Individual Fellowships scheme of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions for a European fellowship. These fellowships last 12-24 months and have a research project as their focus, with a strong element of advanced training both in the research area and in transferable skills

Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Newcastle is an interdisciplinary research group. Its members work between the early medieval to the early modern periods, and belong to the disciplines of Literature, Archaeology, History, Classics and Music. Recent projects which exemplify the group’s strengths include the Tudor Partbooks Project (www.tudorpartbooks.ac.uk); The Thomas Nashe Project (https://research.ncl.ac.uk/thethomasnasheproject) and Cultural Heritage through Time (http://cht2-project.eu).

Past Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship projects include RESTOMO and RES.CO.PART (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/historical/research/projects). Our most recent Fellowship award (beginning September 2017), entitled ‘Sacred Landscapes in Late Byzantium’.

We warmly encourage applications from outstanding scholars eager to work in an interdisciplinary environment for the Individual Fellowship Scheme. Applicants must have a track record – appropriate to career stage – of peer-reviewed publication(s) in internationally recognised outlets.

We specifically welcome applications in three key areas:

Scholarly Editing: MEMS has wide-ranging and world-leading expertise in editing early modern prose, poetry, drama and music. We invite candidates who are developing or conducting scholarly editing projects in medieval or early modern texts (up to c. 1800). Projects that enhance our existing expertise in digital applications and methodologies are of particular interest.

Landscapes: MEMS has significant strengths in the investigation of landscapes as historic, acoustic, ceremonial, social and architectural space. We invite candidates wishing to pursue projects involving one or more of the following: the investigation and analysis of historic landscapes; the development of digital tools (which facilitate scholarly investigation of and public engagement with historic landscapes and buildings); multidisciplinary approaches to understanding historic landscapes; or landscape-based approaches to medieval and early modern cultural heritage.

Voices and Books: MEMS is home to cutting-edge research in literature and music dedicated to exploring the life of text off the page. We invite candidates who are developing or conducting research projects that seek to expand the evidence base of the material history of reading, to explore the sound worlds of early modern books, or the implications of recovering ‘voice’ for the development of literary studies/musicology today.

Eligibility

Please see the website: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/mems/mariesklodowska-curiefellowships.

Expressions of Interest

Expressions of interest should be sent to ruth.connolly@ncl.ac.uk and magnus.williamson@ncl.ac.uk by 1 June, 2017. Please submit:

  1. A copy of your CV that is a maximum of five (5) pages.
  2. A two (2) page outline of the proposed project which identifies a proposed supervisor from the MEMS membership. (You should contact that supervisor before sending in your Expression of Interest).

These should be sent as PDFs with file names indicating your surname, first name initial, and document (e.g. kingbCV; kingbPROPOSAL).

For full details and to apply, please visit: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BBJ445/marie-sklodowska-curie-fellowship-in-medieval-and-early-modern-studies.

Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Discovery and Settlement 1450-1850 – Call For Papers

Call for essay/chapter proposals for an edited collection
Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Discovery and Settlement 1450 – 1850

Family networks transcending national ties and traditional boundaries relating to gender, class, religion, and race, were central to the project of discovery, trade expansion, settlement, and ultimately empire building, in the early modern period. This was a period of flux and roles and relations within and outside households were affected. The aim of this collection is to investigate families where members travelled in order to trade or to maintain the maritime and military infrastructure that enabled that trade to flourish. It will encompass the extended family in its widest sense, encompassing common law husbands and wives, mistresses, children legitimate and illegitimate, apprentices, servants and slaves. Individuals and family units chose to uproot, travel and labour (or manage the labour of others) in unfamiliar surroundings, while others were forced to. While some travelled what we would today consider short distances (for example: from Cordoba to Seville to profit from Castile’s trade with the Indies or from Winchester to London when the wool trade underwent a slump in the west of England), others went much further. While the Atlantic historian, Christopher Bayly, has argued that the term ‘transnational’ is not applicable to an era before the formation of nation states, other scholars have pointed out that there were groups displaying characteristics associated with contemporary transnationalism as early as the fifteenth century. I would expect that some of the families in this collection will demonstrate such characteristics: personal mobility; membership of networks transcending distance; adaptability to a variety of locales and cultures; and a continuing connection to their place of origin. This last point is important for, as Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks has shown, interactions and relationships between mobile individuals affect those within their network who are not and so even fixed locations can be ‘saturated with transnational relationships’.

Since the early 1900s, historians have embraced the idea of the ‘network’ in order to understand how, when and why goods, people and ideas spread. There is really no other concept that embraces the idea of a ‘thick web of relationships’ characterized by the by the circulation of goods, people and ideas. Although the idea of a trading network is commonly associated with economic history, it is increasingly understood that relationships matter – that the efficiency and profitability of a trading network depended on the strength of personal ties between people. In investigating trading networks through the prism of extended family, the aim of this collection is to not only enrich our knowledge of trading communities, but to initiate a rethink of the nature of the family in this early period of European expansion.

Although I welcome topic suggestions, I envisage that the book will cover:

  • Keeping it in the family (for example: how family businesses/family trading networks were set up, maintained and adapted).
  • Maintaining families (for example: how families dealt with change, distance and separation).
  • Making families (for example: how individuals cut off from their relations made new families).
  • Gender (for example: how traditional gender roles could be embedded or challenged by changed circumstances).
  • Race, hybridity and creolization (for example: how individuals adapted to unfamiliar cultures and races, and how families were formed that challenged cultural and racial barriers).
  • Religion (for example: how families adapted to religious change and how families worked to maintain their religious integrity in international trading networks).
  • Communicating family (how the importance of family and warnings about the dangers inherent in leaving family were communicated through ballads, broadsheets, sermons and plays. In some cases, this occurred in direct juxtaposition to communications by companies and nations encouraging individuals to travel).

First stage timeline for contributors:

  • 2 July 2017: Proposal (title, abstract of 300 words and biographical statement) due.
  • 15 July 2018: Essays of 5000 to 8000 words (with confirmed list of images and low-resolution copies if applicable) due. Please note that there is a wide word range until I know the number of contributors. If you feel strongly about the size of your essay, do let me know at this stage.

Contact: Dr Heather Dalton, School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. Email: hgdalton@hotmail.com.

University of Melbourne: Professor in Screen Studies – Call For Applications

University of Melbourne
Professor in Screen Studies

Work type: Continuing
Location: Parkville
Salary: $187,654 p.a. plus 17% superannuation

The School of Culture and Communication is a thriving research hub for critical thinking in the humanities. This agenda is led by world-leading scholars whose fields of research include literary and cultural studies, art history, cinema and performance, media and communication and Australian Indigenous studies. The School is also host to a range of funded research concentrations, such as the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, the Australian Centre, the Centre for Advancing Journalism, the Research Unit in Public Cultures and the Transformative Technologies Research Unit. More broadly, our academics publish, speak and blog on topics as diverse as romanticism, poetry, Asian popular culture, digital media, climate change, network societies, gender and sexuality, racism, cosmopolitanism, and contemporary arts.

The Professor of Screen Studies will be expected to make major contributions in the areas of research, academic leadership, administration and professional development, and teaching excellence at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels including RHD supervision.The appointee will have an established research specialisation in an aspect of Screen Studies, and potential to achieve a high level of research performance through refereed publications and the securing of research grants. A principal duty of the successful appointee will be to foster interdisciplinary activities and engagement activities connected to the discipline.

For full information and to apply, please visit: http://jobs.unimelb.edu.au/caw/en/job/890703/professor-in-screen-studies

Applications close: 20 June, 2017.