JOB: Postdocs in Environmental History of Socialism and the History of Socialist Science at UCL

11 Nov JOB: Postdocs in Environmental History of Socialism and the History of Socialist Science at UCL

Applications are open for research positions in the Environmental History of Socialism and the History of Socialist Science at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) within the framework of The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts, a five-year interdisciplinary research project awarded in the ERC Consolidator Grant competition and funded through a UKRI Frontier Research grant.

The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) sets out to radically transform current debates on the Anthropocene, addressing the major lacuna in existing accounts by establishing the Socialist Anthropocene as a novel conceptual framework that asserts the constitutive role of the twentieth century environmental histories of socialism in the formation of the new geological age. It is the first large-scale interdisciplinary research project that institutes the Socialist Anthropocene as a new field of study within the critical corpus concerned with challenging and decentring the West-centric discourses of the Anthropocene. The approach of the project is to reconstruct the histories of the Socialist Anthropocene through visual arts led interdisciplinary research, which entails analysing historical artworks and engaging with contemporary art practices that act as a catalyst to integrate the insights of multiple disciplines and as a critical agent to pose ambitious and expansive questions, challenging assumptions and engendering new cross-disciplinary paradigms to illuminate the specificities of the Socialist Anthropocene.

The Postdoctoral Research Fellows will carry out an individual research project into an aspect of the environmental history of socialism or the history of socialist science. They will contribute to the reconstruction of the histories of the Socialist Anthropocene with a focus on the themes of extractivism, infrastructure and agriculture by engaging in an interdisciplinary dialogue with fellow members of the SAVA team. The two positions are contracted for 30 months, beginning on 1 January 2023, at 0.5 FTE, and the fellows will be based in the Postsocialist Art Centre at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies.

For more details and to apply see:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/postsocialist-art-centre-pact