Do you want to contribute as a PhD candidate to a groundbreaking Vici project at the intersection of history, book history and literary theory? Are you a team worker with an affinity for Digital Humanities (DH) research, and would you like to work in an informal, interdisciplinary setting in the Department of Modern Languages? If so, then we are looking for you! As part of the Vici project on Civic fictions, you will design a PhD project with a book history focus, to study the 18th-century reception of texts and publications dealing with slavery and abolition from a comparative European perspective (Netherlands, France, British Isles). You will use 18th-century debates on slavery and abolition as a case study to test the validity of modern theories of fiction-induced empathy as a force for societal change. In particular, you will identify and study historical readers of slavery-related books, including women, to explore the intersection of multiple societal players and political agendas, and the 18th-century gendering of slavery discourse.
To address these questions, you will establish a corpus of fictional and non-fictional publications relating to slavery, mapping their occurrences across the Vici project data ecosystem (private library catalogues, bookseller archives, library lending records, and more, as recorded in
MEDIATE,
FBTEE,
SHEWROTE, and other databases). You will establish links between texts, books and historical readers, and identify specific reader constituencies in this reception history. By analysing the emerging patterns and frequencies, and focusing on a number of significant case studies, you will ultimately provide new insight into the multiple meanings of slavery for 18th-century readers, and the question how they read slavery discourse – empathically, or within other epistemological frameworks.
Up to 75% of your time will be devoted to the research for and writing of your PhD thesis. The remaining 25% will be spent on training and academic service to the Faculty of Arts, including teaching.