PhD position: Global History/Violence Studies with a regional focus on South America

The Department of History at the University of Basel, Switzerland, invites applications for a PhD position in a global history project led by Prof. Dr. Marie Muschalek (principal investigator, PI), to be filled as of April 1st, 2025 or by agreement.
The project  Killing to Keep – Violent Field Practices and Natural History in the Age of Empire funded by the Swiss National Research Foundation explores the life-worlds of nature experts who killed animals in order to keep and study them in the long nineteenth century. Team members will research the practices, people, and objects of this endeavor in multiple places in the world:
Case study 1: Birds in the tropical dry and moist forests of Northern South America
Case study 2: Fish and mollusks in the shallow and deep waters of the Southwestern Pacific
Case study 3: Large mammals in the mixed wood and grasslands of Southern Africa (done by the PI)
We seek researchers interested in: 1) daily practices in the field, manual skills and techniques of capturing, shooting, skinning, and preserving animals, 2) the men and women, indigenous and intruder alike, involved in the business of collecting animals-turned-specimens, and/or 3) the specimens, trophies, and marketable commodities they produced. Our goal is to account for the complexities of human curiosity and the many different and culturally specific histories of violence against nonhuman and human life within the broader framework of colonial subjugation and its politics of difference.