PhD-student position available as part of a collaboration between Þjóðfræðistofa in the Strandir Region of Westfjords, and Ludwig-Maximilians- Univers
- --
- 30. September 2022
- 00:00 til 23:59
- Grant Application, Westfjords Research Group
UW wants to draw attention to a PhD-student position in the frame of a cooperation project
between Þjóðfræðistofa in the Strandir Region, Westfjords, and Ludwig-Maximilians-
University, Munich/Bavaria.
The PhD-student will be hired to Ludwig-Maximilians-University, but will work part of the
year in the Strandir region, Westfjords. Excellent knowledge of written and oral Icelandic is
required.
Application deadline: 30.09.2022
Official call for applications: LINK
Dr. Matthias Egeler and Jón Jónsson write in a recent blog on the background of this research project.
More info about the PhD position:
The German Research Association is funding a project on “Storytelling at the Edge of
Civilisation: Mapping, Contextualisation, and Analysis of Landscape-related Storytelling
Traditions in the Icelandic Westfjords”. This project will be conducted as a collaboration
between the Institute for Scandinavian Studies of LMU Munich, the Folklore Institute of the
University of Iceland in Hólmavík and the LMU Center for Digital Humanities in Munich. We
invite applications for a fully funded 3-year PhD position based at LMU Munich in Germany.
About 3 months of fieldwork per year will be conducted in Strandir in the Icelandic
Westfjords. For the official call for applications please follow this LINK.
The main aim of the project is to map, contextualize and analyze storytelling traditions in
the northern part of the Strandir district of the Icelandic Westfjords before the ongoing
demographic collapse of the region leads to the irrevocable loss of this heritage. This also
entails conducting interviews, the on-site documentation of storytelling places and the
digital archiving of the collected data. For this, the candidate will work with an international
team (among others the Rannsóknasetur Háskóla Íslands á Ströndum - Þjóðfræðistofa and
the LMU Center for Digital Humanities in Munich) as well as the local population.
The tasks of the job holder include:
- The independent organisation and realisation of on-site visits, also on remote Icelandic
farmsteads with no connection to public transport;
- Conducting and transcribing interviews in Icelandic;
- On-site visits and documentation of places (among others through photography, GPS,
sketch plans) in sometimes difficult terrain;
- The active and independent participation in the documentation and archiving of the
collected data by means of a digital database; this requires a close collaboration with the
LMU Center for Digital Humanities in Munich, especially in designing the data scheme and
user interface/web surface for the georeferenced representation of the data (“digital map”);
- Completing a PhD thesis within the framework of the project and under supervision of its
PI, in which the documented storytelling tradition is analysed with recourse to approaches
of the research paradigm of ecocriticism (including postcolonial ecocriticism and
ecofeminism) and the environmental humanities more generally;
- Work on a number of research articles regarding aspects of the analysis of the empirical
data and fundamental questions of methodology;
- Participation in events within the framework of the project;
- Participation in measures for the communication of research results to a broader public.
Required for the position is a university degree in a relevant discipline that qualifies the
applicant to pursue a doctoral degree as well as excellent knowledge of the modern
Icelandic language in both its spoken and its written form. The work entails c. 3 months of
fieldwork in Strandir per year. The position is limited to a duration of 3 years, starting 1 April
2023.
