PhD position, project LangPro: 'Societies and Guilds Language Industry

PhD position, project Lang Pro: 'Societies and Guilds in the Language Industry'

Leiden University was founded in 1575 and is one of Europe’s leading international research universities.

Professional Opportunities in the Early Modern Language Sector ) (1.0 fte, 4 years)
The PhD candidate will be working within the ERC Starting Grant research project Lang Pro, funded for  by the European Research Council, and directed by dr. Alisa van de Haar (university lecturer in historical French literature at Leiden University). Prof. Nadine Akkerman (professor in early modern literature and culture at Leiden University) will be the co-supervisor of the PhD candidate.

The Lang Pro project examines the notion of the language sector in early modern North-West Europe: that part of early modern societies and economies which relied primarily on language skills. The early modern period saw a swift increase in occupational opportunities for men and women who possessed language skills such as reading, writing, and text editing in one or more languages.

However, since language professionals have never been studied as a separate category in the early modern workforce, the possibilities that existed for linguistically skilled individuals remain a big unknown. Lang Pro’s central research question is:
What professional, financial, and social opportunities did the early modern language sector offer to men and women in the Low Countries, France, the German lands, and England, between 1550 and 1650? Laying the groundwork for a new research domain on the history of the language sector, the project team will develop a prosopographical database that makes it possible to gain insight into the characteristics of professionals in the past whose core business was language and the nature of the sector that employed them.

This PhD project will examine how language professionals supported each other by uniting in guilds, societies, and associations in early modern North-West Europe. To this end, the PhD candidate will study early modern archives of guilds and associations related to the language industry in the Low Countries, France, Germany, and England, between 1550 and 1650. Studying the organisations that were related to the language sector is imperative for our understanding of the functioning of this professional domain: to what extent and how did guilds in the language sector verify and guarantee the levels of language proficiency of their members?

In what types of conflict did guilds in the language sector mediate? What schooling did they offer?

This PhD project will yield new insights into the differences between various regions in North-West Europe regarding the forms of institutional support that was available to language professionals, the professions to which these organisations catered (e.g. language teachers, secretaries, etc.), and their functioning. It will thus yield crucial insights into the social functioning of the early modern language sector, as well as into the functioning of the guild system itself.

Besides working on this individual research project, the PhD candidate will also collaborate with other team members in the Lang Pro project to build a database on early modern language professionals.

• Conducting archival research on early modern guilds related to the language sector in North-West Europe. An important part of this research will take place in archives in the UK, Belgium, Germany, and France;
• Completing a PhD thesis (in English) within four years;
• Contributing to the project’s collaborative database;
• Publishing at least two (co-authored) articles in peer-reviewed journals or volumes;
• Presenting papers at conferences, both in the Netherlands and internationally;
• Participating in monthly meetings of the project research group;
• Participating in the training programme of the LUCAS (Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society) Institute, the Leiden Graduate School of Humanities, the Huizinga Institute (Netherlands Research School for Cultural History), and other relevant…