PhD Transimperial History of Women’s

Organisational unit Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC)

Employment 1 fte - 1 fte

The Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC) is looking for two highly motivated PhD candidates to join a research group led by Dr. Natália da Silva Perez examining how European colonial expansion (1600–1900) influenced ideas about women’s work. This research project combines archival research and computational text analysis of ideas on gendered labour across different transimperial locales. If selected, you will carry your own PhD research as part of this collaborative research team, and will focus on one of the following historical cases:

• Pernambuco
• Atlantic Africa (for example, Senegambia, Gold Coast, or Angola)

Your PhD research will focus on one of the project’s historical cases to examine how women’s lived experiences conformed to, or diverged from, normative ideas about gendered labour circulating between colonies and European metropoles.

Your tasks will include:

• Contributing to building and curating multilingual, trans-imperial, diachronic datasets focused on historical evidence of women’s work (including handwritten and printed archival material)
• Using Transkribus for transcription of texts in Portuguese, Dutch, French, English, Spanish, and/or Danish (depending on your linguistic expertise) and conducting manual corrections of the transcription results
• Conducting quantitative analyses using computational/digital humanities/statistical methods
• Presenting your research at conferences
• Publishing findings both as co-authored and single authored peer-reviewed articles as part of your article-based PhD dissertation
• Teaching at the history department.

Must-have requirements

• A (research) master’s degree in history, gender studies, digital humanities, or any other relevant area, completed by the start date
• Excellent knowledge of English for academic writing, presenting, and publishing
• Strong knowledge of at least one other language required for archival research and analysis related to your chosen historical case. Willingness to acquire skills in additional languages relevant to the project will be considered positively:
  • Pernambuco:
    Portuguese, Dutch, and/or Spanish
  • Atlantic Africa (for example, Senegambia, Gold Coast, or Angola):
    Portuguese, Dutch, French, English, and/or Danish
• Demonstrable interest in, or experience with, early modern/colonial history, gender history, and/or the relationship between the Colonial Atlantic and European metropoles
• Experience and enthusiasm working with computational/digital methods (such as handwritten text recognition, natural language processing, statistics, etc) or willing to acquire and develop your skills in these methods
• Strong analytical and academic writing skills, curiosity, and comfort with methodological experimentation
• Ability to work both independently and collaboratively in an interdisciplinary team
• Cultural sensitivity and reflexivity when working with archival material relating to enslaved and colonized peoples.

Nice-to-have:

• Working knowledge of any additional languages relevant to the project, or willingness to acquire skills in an additional language (among, for example, Portuguese, Dutch, French, English, Spanish, and/or Danish)
• Prior experience with archival/paleographic research, qualitative coding, corpus-based text analysis
• Familiarity with intersectionality, social reproductive theory, or interpretivist historical methods.

We offer you an internationally oriented and varied job in an enthusiastic team, with excellent working conditions in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities (CAO-NU).

The start date of this position is 26-OCT-2026 (or thereafter upon agreement) and you will be based at [class.
26087] in the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC). This position is full time for 1 fte. The salary ranges from a minimum of € 3.204 to a maximum of € 4.051 gross per month Scale PhD on a fulltime basis (38 hours), in accordance with the CAO-NU. The contract is entered into for the duration of one year (with option of extension…