Interested in researching the history of global north-south public health cooperation in a vibrant team? Join us at the ERC-funded
project COOPERATION "Fighting Pandemics from Below: Global North-South Public Health Cooperation in the Middle East and North Africa, 1792-1942" as a PhD researcher!
Your job As a PhD candidate you will be working on a subproject within the Consolidator Grant project COOPERATION (2024-2029) funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and directed by
Dr Ozan Ozavci (Principal Investigator, PI) at the
department of History and Art History. The COOPERATION project will recapture the lost archives and historical knowledge of international public health cooperation between the ‘global north’ and the ‘global south’ by analysing its first and longest-lasting instances: the sanitary councils in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Established in Tangier, Alexandria, Tunis, Istanbul and Tehran, these unprecedented institutions strategised against waves of epidemics and pandemics between the 1790s and the 1940s. Their European, American and native co-founders invented new models for fighting pandemics from below and stopping the diseases in their tracks. They continually strove to overcome the familiar barriers to cooperation posed by inter-imperial competition in a multipolar world, economic inequities, protests against quarantine restrictions and racial and Orientalist biases, among others. COOPERATION project will write an entangled history of health cooperation, by shifting the focus from top-down to bottom-up processes. Consulting archival sources in Europe, MENA, and North America, it will determine the historical preconditions for effective international public health cooperation.
PhD position 1: Istanbul You will be responsible for sub-project 3: Istanbul, which will look into the dynamics of public health cooperation with a focus on the sanitary council in the Ottoman imperial capital. In this position, you will:
- conduct research within the period of appointment in the Netherlands as well as at archives in Istanbul, London, Nantes and Paris, among others;
- publish peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters;
- help with the organisation of an international conference;
- help organise a workshop on sanitary internationalism;
- participate in project meetings and closely collaborate with the other members of the research team;
- help set up project data;
- help with knowledge dissemination activities of the project;
- present research findings at national and international workshops and conferences.
PhD position 2: Alexandria You will be responsible for sub-project 4: Alexandria, which will look into the dynamics of public health cooperation with a focus on the sanitary council in Egypt. In this position, you will:
- conduct research within the period of appointment in the Netherlands as well as at archives in London, Nantes, Paris, and Cairo, among others;
- publish peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters;
- help with the organisation of an international conference;
- help organise a workshop on sanitary internationalism;
- participate in project meetings and closely collaborate with the other members of the research team;
- help set up project data;
- help with knowledge dissemination activities of the project;
- present research findings at national and international workshops and conferences.
Within this project, we also have vacancies for 2 postdoc positions. Take a look at: