Postdoctoral research fellow at ZMO
Timely Histories: A Social History of Time in South Asia
The Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin invites applications for the position of a post-doctoral research fellow with a 4-year contract, starting 1 January 2021. The successful candidate will work in the European Research Council funded Consolidator Grant project, Timely Histories: A Social History of Time in South Asia, which will run at ZMO for five years. The project, led by Nitin Sinha (principal investigator), will comprise two doctoral, two postdoctoral, and one research assis-tant positions. The salary grade for the advertised position corresponds to the German scheme of employment in the public sector (TVöD E13, 100%). Additional funds for research travel, conference participation, and publications are available. The successful candidate will be required to be based in Berlin.
General outline of the project: TIMEHIST – Timely Histories: A Social History of Time in South Asia aims to write a history of t ime and temporal cultures in South Asia between the 1500s and the 1950s on a practice- and process-based understanding of t he past. The details of t he project can be found here.
Advertised position: We seek to hire a postdoctoral researcher working on the unit of ‘work and time’. Against the formidable framework of clock-time discipline, and against prioritising the site of t he factory, this unit will use the nexus of calendrical, ecological, and legal times as the new entry-point to address the relationship between work and time. Moving away from the sole focus on factory and industry, this unit will pay close attention to the sites of agrarian production and ecological settings that de-fined the nature of work along temporal lines. The agrarian temporality was based upon crop pro-duction time, ecological uncertainties, legal interventions, calendrical mix (lunisolar, Fasli, Gregorian), intensification of capitalist ventures, and not least, cycles of debt, bondage, and legal protraction. How did the changing revenue collection patterns and mode of debt payment influence the agrar-ian calendar and work? Season, wind, rainfall, and topography created conditions of work for many types of labouring groups in the past and continue to do so for the vast informal labour even now. What is the history of t he nexus between ecological and legal times, and how did they come together in defining the boundaries of work, work-culture, and work-regulation between the late 18th and the mid-20th century?
Application: Please collate all materials in one single PDF file and send it to Dr Silke Nagel (zmo@zmo.de) by 30 July with the subject ERC-TIMEHIST-WORK&TIME. Please copy your application to timely.histories@gmail.com
