Postdoc Researcher: Art and Liberation Movements during 20th Century Decolonization at University of Amsterdam

[Simon Soon]

Hi everyone, sharing this incredible opportunity along: 

https://werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies/postdoc-researcher-art-and-liberation-movements-during-20th-century-decolonization-netherlands-14891 

The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis currently has a vacant Postdoc researcher position as part of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant project Entangled Freedoms: Decolonial Modernisms as Transnational Relations of Resistance, 1940s-1980s, led by the Principal Investigator, Dr. Sanjukta Sunderason. ASCA is one of the five Research Schools within the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR). The Postdoc project will be part of the department of Arts and Culture (KG, Capacity Group Art History).

As a postdoctoral researcher in Entangled Freedoms, you will be joining the growing Project Team that currently has 2 PhD researchers (working on artistic/cultural archives of Pakistan and East Pakistan/Bangladesh between 1940s-1980s) and 2 Postdoctoral scholars (working on infrastructures of transnational solidarities and Arab aesthetics/poetics).

You will be expected to work on intellectual histories of (visual) art and Afro-Asian liberation movements, and contribute to the project’s core question: How did artists and cultural thinkers from the decolonizing worlds of 20th-century Asia, Africa, and the Middle East imagine and intervene in plural, contesting ideas of “freedom”?

You may work with a range of visual forms - spanning the plastic arts, documentary practices including photography, cinema as well as illustrated periodicals, graphic/print cultures, and exhibition cultures.

Regional scopes of the position are open to contexts of decolonization movements in Asia (for instance, Indonesia, Vietnam, among others) and Africa (for instance, Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, among others) or transnational exhibition sites that were foundational to decolonial liberation movements.

We are stressing, in particular, expertise in vernacular/regional languages (this will depend of course on the specific region you are specializing in) and experience in studying liberation cultures of 20th century decolonization via grassroot, vernacular histories as well as their transnational scales.

We require the following profile from this postdoctoral position:

• - Specialization in art history or literary/cultural history from 20th-century decolonizing and post/colonial worlds in Asia/Africa;
• - Experience in working in intellectual histories using visual art/periodical press/graphic arts/cultural discourse as archives;
• - Track record in working with vernacular/regional languages tied to their specific field/geography of expertise (see description of position for details).-