Posted December 9, 2009

The Opportunity:
Ph.D. scholarship in early modern culture and digital humanities.

The Project:
The Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan is inviting applications for a four-year Ph.D. scholarship to work on the following research projects:

• The Culture of Curiosity in England and Scotland, 1580-1700
• INKE: Implementing New Knowledge Environments (www.inke.ca)

Applicants should propose a Ph.D. thesis project related to some aspect of one of these two projects. Possible topics include, but are not restricted to:

• Travel literature and collecting
• Curiosity as a literary topos in such authors as Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Browne, and Milton
• Informatics and the organization of knowledge in collections of curiosities
• Science, curiosity, and religious devotion
• Rhetoric, language, and early modern collections
• The epistemology of collecting
• Books as containers of textual and non textual data (e.g. the hortus siccus)
• The notebook as a tool of inquiry

The successful candidate will join the textual studies team in INKE,  Major Collaborative Research initiative funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and will be involved in organizing and composing entries for Architecturs of the Book, a peer-reviewed on-line knowledge base which will illustrate technologies and human practices of transmitting knowledge in textual form. He or she will also work on the Digital Ark, an on-line database of collections of curiosities in England and Scotland from 1580-1700.

Qualifications:
M.A. in English Literature. Facility with Latin or a modern European language and advanced skills in computing will be particularly valuable, not not essential.

Starting Date:  September 2010

Stipend:  $18,000 minimum (subject to budget approval)

How to Apply:
Please follow the Department of English guidelines for application, which can be found at http://artsandscience.usask.ca/english/forgraduates/. In your cover letter, please specify that you are applying for this position and provide a substantial description of your research interests as they relate to the two projects named above.

For More Information:  For more information about these research opportunities, please contact Brent Nelson at brent.nelson@usask.ca. The deadline for complete applications is January 15, 2010.