PhD Candidate on the Transimperial History of Women’s Work (1600-1900)

The Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC) is looking for two highly motivated PhD candidates to join a research group led by Dr. Natália da Silva Perez examining how European colonial expansion (1600–1900) influenced ideas about women’s work. This research project combines archival research and computational text analysis of ideas on gendered labour across different transimperial locales. If selected, you will carry your own PhD research as part of this collaborative research team, and will focus on one of the following historical cases:

1. Pernambuco
2. Atlantic Africa (for example, Senegambia, Gold Coast, or Angola)

Job description
Your PhD research will focus on one of the project’s historical cases to examine how women’s lived experiences conformed to, or diverged from, normative ideas about gendered labour circulating between colonies and European metropoles.

Your tasks will include:

• Contributing to building and curating multilingual, trans-imperial, diachronic datasets focused on historical evidence of women’s work (including handwritten and printed archival material)
• Using Transkribus for transcription of texts in Portuguese, Dutch, French, English, Spanish, and/or Danish (depending on your linguistic expertise) and conducting manual corrections of the transcription results
• Conducting qualitative analyses using interpretivist/social reproduction/intersectional approaches
• Conducting quantitative analyses using computational/digital humanities/statistical methods
• Presenting your research at conferences
• Publishing findings both as co-authored and single authored peer-reviewed articles as part of your article-based PhD dissertation
• Teaching at the history department.