Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions/University of Melbourne: 2 Postdoctoral Fellowships – Call For Applications

The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE) seeks to appoint two Postdoctoral Fellows based at the University of Melbourne. Details of both positions can be found below. The closing date for both positions is 19 September 2013 (11:55pm Aus. Eastern Standard Time).
 
 
In collaboration with the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, the Centre seeks to appoint a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to contribute to research projects in the history of emotions (Europe, 1100-1800). Working together with Professor Charles Zika and the Change Program of the Centre, the successful candidate will develop a project exploring the impact of deeply felt emotional experiences and rhetoric in stimulating and shaping group understanding and response to disasters faced by Europeans between the late fifteenth and the late seventeenth centuries. The project might focus on responses to such phenomena as plague, fire or war, or natural disasters such as earthquake, famine or flood. It might explore such ritual, literary and/ or visual responses as mechanisms for achieving relief or solidarity when facing the terrifying the impact of destructive events, and the immediate as well as longer term implications for models of communal life, organisation and meaning.
 
 
In collaboration with the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne, the Centre seeks to appoint a Postdoctoral Fellow to a three-year research appointment in one of its four research programs, “Shaping the Modern.” Working with the program convenor, Professor Stephanie Trigg, and Senior Research Fellow, Dr Grace Moore, the successful candidate will develop a multi-disciplinary research project on emotions and the environment that extends the Centre’s research in the period 1100-1800 into the modern era, with a special emphasis on Australia’s relationship with its European emotional past, and the emotional continuities and discontinuities between pre-modern Europe and Australian settler culture. The project will explore affective, emotional responses to landscapes, environment, ecology or place, by European settlers and migrants.