The
Faculty of Humanities provides education and conducts research with a strong international profile in a large number of disciplines in the field of language and culture. Located in the heart of Amsterdam, the Faculty maintains close ties with many cultural institutes in the capital city. Research and teaching staff focus on interdisciplinary collaboration and are active in several teaching programmes. The Faculty of Humanities offers assistant professors the opportunity to collaborate with leading researchers at research institutes that - partly as a result of their interdisciplinary approach - are world-renowned. Moreover, you will be teaching in a dynamic context in which new teaching methods are being developed. Combining perspectives from Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Literary and Cultural Analysis is dedicated to research and teaching on contemporary culture, the arts, and literature at the intersection of politics and philosophy. We try to make sense of and reflect on works of literature, art, and (popular) culture in close relation to contemporary controversies and developments. We draw from and develop theories rooted in experience (gender and queer studies, disability studies, affect and memory studies), environment and world (environmental humanities, post- and decolonial studies, world literature, infrastructure studies, media archeology) and interdisciplinary analysis (cultural studies, comparative literature, continental philosophy). Central to our programs is the hands-on engagement - through concept-driven close readings - with concrete cultural objects from Global Norths and Global Souths: visual art; films; poems; novels; fashion; television series; art installations; social media; museums and performances; but also culturally significant phenomena such as social movements and environmental or technological transformations. Research on Museums and Heritage studies is one of the central themes of the scholarship in the
Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM). AHM is one of the five research schools of the
Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research. AHM, as a thematic research school, is the research base for a broad spread of disciplines from Heritage, Memory and Museum Studies, to Archaeology, Conservation and Restoration, Media Studies and Art History. Museums and heritage sites are privileged sites of preserving, valuing, contesting and reinterpreting memory, often by means of material culture.
What are you going to do?Within the department of Literary Studies and Linguistics, capacity group Literary and Cultural Analysis, a position is available for an assistant professor of Colonial Heritage and the Shoah in the Netherlands: Displaced Memories in a Globalized Context. This new position aims to bring together the multidisciplinary fields of Cultural Memory and Critical Heritage Studies to examine the ways in which contemporary culture, the arts, literature, memorial museums and sites of painful heritage deal with the collective traumas of the Shoah and European colonialism. The academic and cultural fields and the public debate in the Netherlands have been disparately impacted by new perspectives on the legacies of and implications in these colonial and war histories. Memories travel and are displaced, creating new meanings in different contexts. Currently the field deals with urgent questions: How do debates about coming to terms with painful histories and their ongoing impact on present-day society circulate, translate and travel between academia, cultural institutions and the general public? What are the entanglements of competing and / or multidirectional memories of colonialism and the Shoah, in particular the decolonization war in Indonesia and its effects in the Netherlands, and how do World War Two museums and heritage sites deal with this issue? What are important new concepts for studying spatial and digital aspects of heritage and memory formation and museum practices in our current new media ecology? The complexity of these pressing issues demands ongoing reflection at the crossroads of disciplines and a collaborative approach of academic and professional institutions.
We are looking for a candidate with a strong background in literary, cultural and/or media studies and heritage and memory studies, and well acquainted with the fields of cultural analysis, sites of memory and digital memory studies, who is able to set up a national research network to examine the entanglements of colonial and Shoah heritage sites in the Netherlands and the displacement and traveling of memories. The candidate is able to reflect on museum and heritage practices and also contributes to the academic development of the field. You will provide education in a dynamic context with ample opportunities for the development of innovative teaching methods. Your research will be part of the
Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM).
Tasks and responsibilities:
- Designing and conducting independent research that provides a literary, cultural and/or media studies, and heritage and memory studies view on colonial heritage and the Shoah in the Netherlands, displaced memories and the spatial, digital, ethical and global aspects of commemoration, musealization, and trauma, resulting in academic publications in peer-reviewed international journals and/or books;
- actively pursuing external funding for research, notably funding from research councils, national as well as European;
- actively contributing to and developing national and international research networks and other forms of cooperation;
- actively contributing to the research activities of AHM;
- developing, coordinating and teaching courses mainly in the Bachelor and Master programmes of Literary and Cultural Analysis (in English);
- supervising Bachelor and Master theses and tutoring students; co-supervising PhD dissertations;
- actively contributing to the development and improvement of the broader teaching programmes in the department;
- taking part in committees and working groups, and carrying out departmental administrative tasks as directed.