Are you looking for a challenging position in a dynamic setting? The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (
asca.uva.nl ) currently has a vacant PhD position as part of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant project
Entangled Freedoms: Decolonial Modernisms as Transnational Relations of Resistance, 1940s-1980s, led by principal investigator Dr. Sanjukta Sunderason. ASCA is one of the five Research Schools within the
Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR).
Research at the Faculty of Humanities is carried out by six research schools under the aegis of the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (
aihr.uva.nl). The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (
asca.uva.nl), one of six research schools of the Faculty of Humanities. ASCA is home to more than 110 scholars and 120 PhD candidates, and is a world-leading international research school in Cultural Analysis. ASCA members share a commitment to working in an interdisciplinary framework and to maintaining a close connection with contemporary cultural and political debates.
What are you going to do? You will join the Project Team of the ERC Consolidator Grant project (2024-2029):
Entangled Freedoms: Decolonial Modernisms as Transnational Relations of Resistance, 1940s-1980s. The project studies how artists and cultural thinkers from the decolonizing worlds of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East interacted with – and transformed – ideas of “freedom” during 20th-century decolonization and Cold War. The project foregrounds visual art and artistic discourse from the Global South
as archives to understand plural, contesting ideas of freedom that are found between 1940s-1990s, as retreating European colonial empires intersected with new Cold War geopolitics. Such ideas of freedom include, for instance, western ‘First World’ ideas of universalism and freedom from ideology; Socialist ‘Second World’ visions of freedom as utopian horizons of continued, revolutionary class struggles; and emerging ‘Third World’ visions of anti-colonial, anti-imperial liberation. Studying entanglements of such ideas via artistic forms and thought in the decolonizing worlds can generate new intellectual histories of 20th-century decolonization.
As a member of the
EntangledFreedoms Project Team, you are open to working on 20th-century (visual) art from the Global South with a particular alertness to archives (of art and cultural imagination), wider cultural and intellectual discourses, formations of political thought and cultural resistance.
The
EntangledFreedoms Project Team will have two PhDs and 2 Postdoctoral scholars. While the two Postdoc scholars will study imaginaries of freedom via artistic internationalisms from African and Middle Eastern contexts, the two PhD scholars will address the project’s main concerns from hitherto-disconnected artistic/cultural archives of Pakistan (West and East until 1971) and East Pakistan/Bangladesh between 1940s-1980s.
Please note, for PhD2 (focus East Pakistan/Bangladesh 1940s-1980s), we require the
following profile:
- Background in Art history or literary/cultural history
- Specialization in South Asia with a focus on 20th-century East Pakistan/Bangladesh
- Knowledge of Bangla and access to archives in Bangladesh
- Interest in 20th century cultural and intellectual history of Bangladesh
A separate call for PhD1 (focus: Pakistan 1940s-1980s) is being announced separately.
Tasks and responsibilities: - submission of a PhD thesis;
- participating in meetings and proceedings of the Project Team;
- publishing two single-authored, peer reviewed articles;
- publishing one book chapter in the project’s edited volume;
- presenting intermediate research results at workshops and conferences;
- participation in the Research School and Faculty of Humanities PhD training programmes.