The Department of Media Studies of the Faculty of Humanities is looking for a pre-PhD fellow in the area of education and training in digital methods for the humanities, as part of the  research program Creative Amsterdam: An E-Humanities Perspective (CREATE), supervised by prof. Julia Noordegraaf. CREATE is a research program that uses large-scale digital data and techniques to investigate how cultural industries have shaped Amsterdam’s unique position as a Creative City in a European and global context, from the 17th century until the present day.

Project and job description

Digital methods are increasingly important to humanists. UvA CREATE wishes to support and extend the efforts of the Humanities Faculty in teaching digital methods. The goal is to support teachers in using digital methods within the existing course offering, in a modular and customizable way, and to empower both teachers and students to self-teach digital methods while doing useful and interesting work in their domain. For this reason, CREATE wishes to appoint a Pre-PhD fellow tasked with surveying both existing and envisaged digital methods teaching at UvA. Furthermore, the fellow will help devising and running a set of supporting activities and a pilot project linked with an existing course in the area of performative arts, for the next academic year (2020/21).

The Pre-PhD is embedded in CREATE’s research theme Digital Methods and History. The project is developed and will be supervised by dr Giovanni Colavizza (Digital Humanities). The fellowship also provides an opportunity to develop a PhD proposal, ideally related to the topic of the position or the area of digital methods and digital humanities.

Tasks:

• Survey online course offering and teaching materials, within UvA and outside;
• conduct a survey among UvA teachers, students, alumni and other stakeholders via questionnaires and interviews;
• consolidate results in structured and actionable reports;
• assist and take an active role in the planning of related new supporting activities;
• design and run a pilot project within an existing MA course in performative arts, which will include extending digital methods teaching, preparing new materials, providing support in teaching and grading, etc.

• A degree in a related field, including but not limited to programs in the Arts and Humanities, Education, Social Sciences, Computational Sciences, completed before March 31st, 2020 (required);
• excellent written and spoken English and Dutch (required);
• proved capacity to structure and write reports and slide decks (required);
• previous experience with running surveys (preferred);
• previous experience in teaching or teaching support and/or preparing teaching materials for example as teaching assistant (preferred);
• an interest in education and/or digital methods in the humanities (preferred);
• an interest in performing arts (theatre, music, film) (preferred).

Fixed-term contract: one year.

Temporary employment for 12 months (1 March 2020 until 28 February 2021). The salary will be €2,835 gross per month, based on 38 hours a week. The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities is applicable.

University of Amsterdam

With over 5,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.  

The UvA’s students and employees are independent thinkers, competent rebels who dare to question dogmas and aren’t satisfied with easy answers and standard solutions. To work at the UvA is to work in an independent, creative, innovative and international climate characterised by an open atmosphere and a genuine engagement with the city of Amsterdam and society.