Postdoctoral Researcher - Perpetrators' Heritage, Material Cultures and Imaginaries

Job text:

The Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) currently has a vacant Postdoc researcher position as part of the broader field Cultural Heritage and Identity. Within this field the focus is on material and immaterial heritage, including digital Humanities and on Cultural Heritage and societal changes.

What are you going to do?

The postdoc project investigates how sites connected to World War II perpetrators (party leaders, army commanders, etc.) are preserved and memorialized as well as how they narrate the lives and actions of perpetrators. The project will deepen knowledge of conflicted heritages and difficult pasts through reference to crises of endangerment to proximities, and to experiment with new approaches to ethical memory practice aimed at providing citizens with sustainable tools for transnational, intercultural and intergenerational knowledge exchange and dialogue that will build resilience to unknown future dangers to our affective proximities to the past. As such the projects respond to the research theme ‘Cultural Heritage and Identity’ relating to both heritage contestation and conflict based on the hypotheses that times of transition and crisis enable us to gain special insights into the social significance of material and immaterial heritage and memory practices for inclusion and exclusion; the ways in which social change, sustainable strategies and practices and resilient institutions can be built through partnership working; and how can heritage and memory places continue to advocate for human rights and a better world.

Your tasks and responsibilities:

• conducting research, presenting intermediate research results at workshops and conferences and publishing two single-authored, peer reviewed articles;
• participating in meetings of the project research group and developing a shared database;
• co-organising knowledge dissemination activities;
• actively contributing to the research activities of AHM and developing national and international research networks and other forms of cooperation.

What do you have to offer?

Your experience and profile:

• a PhD in the Humanities with a research focus on Heritage and memory studies, semiotics, archaeology and material Culture, cultural studies, museum studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, or related fields;
• excellent research skills demonstrated by a track record of publishing in high-ranking journals and/or with leading presses or a demonstrable capacity to develop such a record;
• a strong cooperative attitude and willingness to engage in collaborative research;
• enthusiasm for communicating academic research to non-academic audiences;
• excellent command English.

Our offer

The Postdoc researcher will be appointed at the ACASA Amsterdam Centre for Ancient Studies and Archaeology of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. The employment contract will be for one year. Contingent on a positive performance evaluation the contract will be extended with one year. The employment contract is for 30,4-38 hours a week. Preferred starting date is 1 October 2022.

About us

The University of Amsterdam  is the Netherlands' largest university, offering the widest range of academic programmes. At the UvA, 30,000 students, 6,000 staff members and 3,000 PhD candidates study and work in a diverse range of fields, connected by a culture of curiosity.

The deadline for applying for this vacancy is 1 September 2022.