Call for Postdoctoral Fellowship Applications: Humanities for the Environment

The Humanities for the Environment (HfE) programme at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, the University of Pretoria, invites applications for a postdoctoral fellowship commencing in the second half of 2020 or at the start of 2021.

The programme is focused on, but not limited to, our signature project titled The Poetics and Politics of Extraction and the Environment. The thrust of the HfE approach is to encourage critical thinking on the impact of extractivism on the environment and human ecology through a multidisciplinary research cluster comprising the broader humanities and arts. It is based on the assumption that resource extraction has shaped African environmentalism in complex and dynamic ways and cannot be decoupled from any study of health and human settlement; natural resources and human ecology; land and decoloniality; economics and marginality, and broader issues around land, politics, development and infrastructure. The ideal candidate will be interested in the intricate web of African extractive geographies, and the ability to embed such complexity in extant and diverse ways of understanding contemporary environmentalism and its sustainability.

More detail on the African Observatory for Environmental Humanities can be found on the programme’s website (https://www.up.ac.za/south-african-observatory-for-environmental-humanities).

The UP Postdoctoral Fellowships are available to any international or national candidate who qualifies based on the following conditions:

• Must have completed a doctorate, no more than five years prior to their appointment as postdoctoral fellows.
• Must be a young researcher (generally up to 40 years of age).
• Must have a PhD in any discipline of Humanities such as Anthropology, English / Literature, History, Philosophy and certain disciplines in the Social Sciences such as Sociology and Geography.
• Must have worked in the area of environmental studies and / or related field, OR show potential for research interest in environmental humanities.
• Interest in eco-criticism, academic activism, feminism and gender studies, political ecology, political economy, cultural ecology, history, anthropology, and geography will be an added advantage.
• Evidence of active research and publications in peer-reviewed journals will also be an added advantage.

The Postdoctoral Fellowship consists of a tax-free bursary of R 200 000 per year and the fellowship will run for 2 years depending on the progress of the fellow. A UP Postdoctoral Fellowship may also include a travel allowance up to an amount to be determined from time to time, made available to international fellows, for travel to and from the University of Pretoria at the commencement and termination of the fellowship period.

Your application should include a full Curriculum Vitae, three referees with contact details (one of whom must have been a mentor or supervisor of the doctorate), and no more than a three-page motivation for research interest, should be sent to:
Mrs. Kirsty Nepomuceno
Project Co-ordinator
E-mail: [email protected]

Please direct all your queries to:
Professor James Ogude
Director – Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
University of Pretoria.
E-mail: [email protected]

The closing date for applications is 30 June 2020.