Vacaturenr.
15273
Functie-categorie
PhD-posities
Omvang (fte)
1,0
Extern/intern
Extern
Locatie
Leiden
Geplaatst op
12 november 2024
Sluitingsdatum
8 december 2024
Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) invites applications for

THE PROJECT

We are looking for enthusiastic, highly motivated, enterprising and excellent PhD-students to work on their own subprojects as well as collaborate in a research team.
In early modern Europe, students, humanists, collectors, naturalists, soldiers, merchants, civil servants, and women compiled friendship albums—alba amicorum, in Latin—containing paper traces of social networks, friendships, travel, and professional contacts. The pages of these personal volumes contain text—in the form of signatures, dedications, and mottoes—and an abundance of vivid images. Iconographically dense painted pictures, heraldic devices, costume studies and emblems in watercolour, as well as artists’ “signature” drawings figure alongside numerous printed images. IMAGES ON THE MOVE, the first scholarly and digital research project to investigate the rich pictorial culture of alba amicorum, will situate these pictorial microcosms within early modern visual culture in the era of print. The project will analyze the ways in which readers and viewers of pictorial books and printed images came to terms with this new visual language, by studying how diverse groups of users engaged and adapted it in their personal albums. The recent digitization of c.1500 alba amicorum allows for the systematic investigation of mobile vernacular imagery throughout Europe in the first half of the early modern period. The central aim of this project is to reconstruct through (art) historical analysis key components of a shared early modern European visual language, and to do so in a way that affords new insights into the use, reuse, adaptation, and interpretation of images across time and space.

Both candidates will:

• Complete a PhD thesis within four years (1.0fte)
• Participate in meetings of the project research group(s) and events organized by the research group;
• Participate in building of AlbumPics, the database of album image that underpins our project;
• Participate in knowledge utilization activities;
• Present intermediate research results at (international) workshops and conferences;
• Publish at least one peer-review article (apart from the PhD-thesis);
• Participate in the training programme of the local Leiden Graduate School, the LUCAS Institute and the National Research School in Cultural History (Huizinga);
• Participate in intellectual life of the department and the LUCAS (PhD) community;
• Undertake some teaching in the second and third years of the appointment, subject to progress and demand.