Location: Leiden
Max hours per week: 38,00
Max salary: 3.539
Duration of agreement: 1 + 3 years
Apply until: 15 August 2024
Information The Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) is searching for the research project TASTE for:
Three PhD researchers (1.0 fte) The project Trajectories of Taste: An Analytical Framework of Culinary Change after Migration (
TASTE), a European Research Council-funded Consolidator Grant (ERC CoG) led by Prof. Tom Hoogervorst and hosted by the KITLV in Leiden, is looking for three PhD researchers. The project investigates how culinary traditions change after migration. What factors contribute to new eating patterns? What is the role of traditions, memories, cultural contact and emotion? How do economic, socio-cultural and ecological considerations interact? What is taste and on which levels does it operate? Where do ideas about what food “should” taste like come from?
We address these questions by focusing on and collaborating with communities in Suriname, Sri Lanka, or South Africa with origins in the Indonesian archipelago. As such, the project also studies the role of colonial-era displacement, muted histories, and survival strategies through food. Each of the three PhD candidates will explore the broad issue of culinary change within the context of one specific destination country (Suriname, Sri Lanka, or South Africa).
What will you do? Within the research project, you will work on your PhD research. You will address the project’s main research question of how culinary traditions change after migration, focusing on the transformations of “Indonesian” food practices, dishes, and recipes in the “diaspora”. Your project contains a historical factor and will also involve extensive fieldwork (a total of six months) in your chosen destination country. During this time, you will collaborate with local consultants by conducting semi-structured interviews, documenting oral histories, engaging in participant observation, collecting relevant written and audiovisual material, and/or employing other methods in which you are experienced (as outlined in your research proposal).
You will also collaborate within a team context, which includes three PhD candidates, a Principal Investigator, and a Postdoctoral Researcher. This collaboration will involve short fieldwork trips and the co-organization of academic and public events, both in the destination countries and in the Netherlands.
What do we offer? You will work full-time (or at 0,8 fte) at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), an international and transdisciplinary institute in Leiden, the Netherlands. Here, you will participate in the institute’s dynamic academic activities. We believe in long-term collaborations between people from diverse disciplinary and geographical backgrounds. We also value the important research and other work conducted by local universities, cultural organizations, and heritage organizations in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. We hope you will become a long-term partner in our academic network.