The Department of History and Art History seeks to appoint a PhD candidate for the project “Sharing Knowledge in Learned and Literary Networks: the Republic of Letters as a pan-European Knowledge Society”, funded by means of an ERC Consolidator grant awarded to Dr Dirk van Miert.

The PhD candidate will be working on the following project: " The structure of the networks of the Republic of Letters, 1400-1800”.

The aim of this PhD project is to analyse the social network of the Republic of Letters over a period of four centuries. Using metadata of tens of thousands of early modern scholarly letters, the candidate will map the Republic of Letters’ topological structure on a grand scale, the candidate is expected to identify small worlds, to interpret what these consisted of and to analyse how well they were integrated into the larger network. The metadata of the letters define clear parameters for the mapping and weighing of lines of communication, grades of separation, strength of nodes and centrality of hubs throughout a much broader social, geographical, disciplinary and linguistic network, and will account for how this network evolved over time. Filtering via terms based on geographical coordinates and periods, the project will have to provide flexible maps and graphs visualising different types of hierarchy that existed in the network.

A successful PhD candidate should preferably have:

• a (research) Master degree in social sciences or in early modern history;
• demonstrable experience with large-scale digital social network analysis;
• experience with historical dates, proper names and place names, in particular with digital authority files and gazetteers;
• excellent command of English, both written and orally; a working knowledge of Latin is recommendable;
• an outstanding record of undergraduate and Master's degree work;
• strong writing skills;
• capacity to work both as a creative and independent researcher and as part of a team;

The positions can be offered for 1.0 FTE, start date from 1 January 2018 onwards. The appointment is for an initial period of 18 months which, after a positive assessment of progress made, will be extended by another 30 months (4 years in total). The gross salary ranges between € 2,222 in the first year, ending at € 2,840 in the fourth year (Collective Employment Agreement for Dutch Universities) gross per month for a full-time employment. 

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