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The PhD candidate will be working on a subproject within the ERC Consolidator research project FEATHERS, funded for 2020-2025 by the European Research Council (ERC), and directed by Nadine Akkerman (Reader in early modern English Literature at Leiden University).
Manuscript production was a collaborative or ‘socialised’ enterprise that often involved secretaries and scribes who physically wrote what the author dictated. FEATHERS will overhaul historical approaches and offer new ways to assess the partnership between employer and scribe thus expanding the notion of early modern authorship to include hitherto marginalised voices: of women, the poor, the illiterate and the lower-born – those who ‘wrote’ without physically writing.
To distinguish authorial and scribal voices it will analyse 3 distinct manuscript types: Letters, Legal documents, and Literary works. It will address 3 questions: who were these scribes; what was their role or function, and where did their influence end and their employer’s begin?
The project will concentrate on England 1558-1642, a time when the centres of power were stable enough to allow for relatively constant employment, making individual scribes and their influence easier to identify. The model we create will be applicable to multiple political periods and countries.
Subproject: The Amanuensis & His Mistress: The Secretaries of Queen Elizabeth I, c.1558-1603 (PhD1) We are looking for a highly motivated, enterprising and enthusiastic PhD candidate to join the project team and write a thesis crucial for understanding the ways in which a secretary might interact and influence their female patron. When household accounts are absent or fragmentary, the only way to identify a secretary is by studying an entire body of correspondence. Most female correspondences comprise mere handfuls, but this is not true for the epistolary remains of queens or queen-consorts. Still, besides Elizabeth I and Elizabeth Stuart, no Tudor or Stuart queen’s letters have yet been annotated or even collected. This makes it all the more surprising that Queen Elizabeth I’s secretariat has received only piecemeal attention, excepting studies of her foreign language letters and secretaries/scribes (Bajetta; Andreani; Bajetta, Coatalen and Gibson). The English language scribes languish uninvestigated, let alone cross-referenced. Who were her personal secretaries/scribes and did they overlap with government functionaries? The PhD candidate is expected to conduct an analysis of c.2500 letters, namely the corpus of Elizabeth I, through computational authorship attribution (stylometrics), and the study of individual secretaries who worked under her, to reveal the queen’s authorship and, alongside another subproject working on her gender counterpart King James VI/I, help create a working definition of the early modern secretary.
Key responsibilities
The PhD project has a duration of 4 years (1.0 FTE, 38 hrs per week). The starting date is on 1 February 2021. Initially the employee will receive a one-year contract, with extension for the following 36 months on condition of a positive evaluation. The appointment must lead to the completion of a PhD thesis. Salary range from € 2,395.- to € 3,061.- gross per month (pay scale P in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities).
International candidates are especially encouraged to apply, but must be willing to relocate to the Netherlands for the duration of the project. Candidates are not expected to learn Dutch.
Leiden University offers an attractive benefits package with additional holiday (8%) and end-of-year bonuses (8.3%), training and career development. Our individual choices model gives you some freedom to assemble your own set of terms and conditions. Candidates from outside the Netherlands may be eligible for a substantial tax break.
Diversity
Leiden University is strongly committed to diversity within its community and especially welcomes applications from members of underrepresented groups.
The Faculty of Humanities is a unique international centre for the advanced study of languages, cultures, arts, and societies worldwide, in their historical contexts from prehistory to the present. Our faculty is home to more than 6,000 students and 800 staff members. For more information see the website.
The Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) is one of the seven Research Institutes of the Faculty of Humanities. LUCAS is dedicated to ground-breaking research that explores the multifaceted relationships between the arts and society. For more information see he website.
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