Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Digital Database/Map Design Skills for Historical Research

The Senior PRF will be responsible for designing and creating, in collaboration with the PI and the project's Research Software Engineer (RSE), the database that will support the 'Merchant Connections' (Digital Humanities) and 'Antwerp Topographies' (Interactive J Mapping) strands of CHCH. They will also carry out some archival research and work with the project team to populate the database and produce the outputs from the database and the project more generally.

Do you have experience in Relational databases?, Do you have a Doctoral degree?, The successful candidate will already have postdoctoral experience of working with digital mapping and relational databases. Working closely with the RSE and PI, the Sr PRF will also contribute to the design of the project website.

This role meets the eligibility requirements for a skilled worker certificate of sponsorship under UK Visas and Immigration legislation. Therefore, UCL welcomes applications from international applicants who require a visa., The successful candidate will already have postdoctoral experience of working with digital mapping and relational databases. Working closely with the RSE and PI, the Sr PRF will also contribute to the design of the project website.

They will have a PhD in historical geography, early modern history, architectural history, digital humanities, urban history, heritage, or a related field.

They will have experience of working with relational databases and interactive digital mapping (GIS, etc.) as well as a demonstrable understanding of current debates in early modern transnational history and material culture, urban heritage and/or historical geography.

SELCS-CMII is a world-leading centre for teaching, research and public engagement, focusing on the literature, linguistic traditions, history, sociology, philosophy, art, film and other aspects of the cultures associated with the languages we teach (Danish, Dutch, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Old Norse, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish). Applications are invited for the position of Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Sr PRF) for 'Connecting Histories, Connecting Heritage: Early Modern Cities and Their Afterlives' (CHCH), is a research project funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) as part of its Future Leaders Fellowship scheme and led by Dr Christina M. Anderson (PI). CHCH is developing a new framework for understanding the ways in which the histories of early modern cities are inextricably bound up with those of the places to which they were connected. Utilising digital humanities methods, interactive mapping, interconnected microhistory and virtual reality, the project will expose and analyse the stories of other places hidden within the materiality of the cityscape, as well as the mechanisms behind the transformation of early modern exchanges into urban materiality. The project will employ sixteenth-century Antwerp as its principal case study. In studying early modern urban materiality, CHCH will also develop a novel approach to transnational heritage that will provide a basis for seeing ourselves as global citizens not in spite of our connections to a particular home, but because of them. CHCH will thereby also better enable the crossnational solidarity needed to meet current global challenges., 'Merchant Connections' will form the basis for understanding the merchant networks in which early modern Antwerp was entangled and, thereby, the places to which it was connected. It involves summarizing and analysing over 2000 archival documents (mostly notary acts) already collected from archives across Europe and in seven different languages, as well as approximately 1000 more to be gathered during the project. The summaries of these documents entered in the database will be used to create network visualisations. 'Antwerp Topographies' aims to connect the project's archival research (the above-mentioned documents plus early maps, street histories, architectural archives and heritage registers in Antwerp and elsewhere in Belgium, etc.) to specific features of the city such as buildings, streets, squares, collections, and so forth, through the creation of a multi-layered interactive historical map.