One postdoc position and three PhD positions are available on the KU Leuven ERC Starting Grant project “Making Migrant Voices Heard Through Literature: How Collaboration is Changing the Cultural Field” (COLLAB, 2023-2028). Positions start on 1 September 2023. The application deadline is 15 April 2023. 

Overview of the vacancies:
1) Postdoctoral Researcher in the Fields of Social Sciences and Literary Studies (36 months) with experience in field research, especially with migrant populations and civil society actors, and ability to work in interdisciplinary settings. More information here.

2) PhD Researcher in the Fields of Social Sciences and Literary Studies with a background in Comparative Literature, Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, European Studies, Social Sciences or a related area and a strong interest in the analysis of literary texts in their social and cultural setting, especially in migration contexts. More information here.

3) PhD Researcher in Comparative Literature with strong multilingual skills to work on the analysis of collaborative texts that emerge from encounters with migrants, with a particular focus on the implications of transcultural mediation in the genres of the anthology and the short story collection. More information here.

4) PhD Researcher in the Fields of Literary Studies and Business Economics with an interest in digital humanities and the institutional aspects of literary production to study the impact of crowdfunding on the publishing industry, especially in today’s context of migration. More information here.

Within the context of the ID-N project NIKAW (Networks of Ideas and Knowledge in the Ancient World), funded by the Special Research Fund (BOF) of KU Leuven, applications are invited for a PhD position on the subject of social network analysis for the transmission of ideas in the ancient world. The NIKAW project aims to exploit textual information from the ancient world to reconstruct the transmission of knowledge across multilingual, geographically and chronologically extended communities.

The PhD candidate will focus on the study of the relations emerging from the mentions of names in Greek and Latin texts. Part of the tasks will be carried out in collaboration with another PhD student and one Postdoc. Using a large set of automatically retrieved passages, gathered by the other PhD scholar, the candidate will reconstruct and exploit the network of intellectual relations over a large span of time. A particular test-case on the first stages of the advent of Christianity is foreseen. Research will be carried out along two tracks:

• Firstly, the candidate will develop a graph database model to properly represent the mentions of people in ancient texts. To this end, the candidate will work closely with the PhD scholar working on the extraction and disambiguation of names in ancient texts.
• Secondly, the candidate will use the graph database to reconstruct and analyze the network of mentions in ancient texts, applying tools of Social Network Analysis. In collaboration with the Postdoctoral scholar, the candidate will also investigate the application of more advanced techniques such as learning relevant structural features with the use of network embeddings. In particular, the PhD student will analyze the changes in the network in the first four centuries of the Common Era, observing how the integration of Christian authors impacts relevant network features.

The deadline to submit an application for this PhD position is 8 September 2022. The candidate is expected to start in November 2022 or as soon as possible thereafter. The position is a full-time position for one year and can be extended to four years pending initial positive evaluation.

For more information on the desired profile and how to apply, see the full job listing on the KU Leuven job portal.

Within the context of the ID-N project NIKAW (Networks of Ideas and Knowledge in the Ancient World), funded by the Special Research Fund (BOF) of KU Leuven, applications are invited for a PhD position on the subject of machine learning for information extraction from ancient texts. The NIKAW project aims to exploit textual information from the ancient world to reconstruct the transmission of knowledge across multilingual, geographically and chronologically extended communities. 

The PhD candidate will focus on the extraction of relevant information from Ancient Greek and Latin texts, which will subsequently be used for further analyses within the project. Part of the tasks will be carried out in collaboration with another PhD student and one Postdoc. Research will be carried out along three tracks:

• Firstly, the candidate will develop a state of the art natural language processing pipeline for named entity extraction and named entity linking, specifically tailored towards classical texts. 
• Secondly, the candidate will develop a bilingual language model (Ancient Greek-Latin), based on neural NLP methods, that will facilitate named entity extraction and linking, and the representation of the context of the mentions in the corpus used.
• Thirdly, the candidate will improve the natural language processing pipeline by making use of additional information developed by other project members. This includes knowledge on potential linguistic and personal relations gained from social network analysis and learned network embeddings.

The deadline to submit an application for this PhD position is 8 September 2022. The candidate is expected to start in November 2022 or as soon as possible thereafter. The position is a full-time position for one year and can be extended to four years pending initial positive evaluation. 

For more information on the desired profile and how to apply, see the full job listing on the KU Leuven job portal. 

The Early Modern History Research Group at KU Leuven is accepting applications for a postdoctoral position on the European Research Council funded project “Regionalizing Infrastructures in Chinese History.” This project examines how large-scale infrastructures such as roads, city walls, and bridges contributed to regional and empire-wide integration, but equally why and how processes of integration regularly broke down, and how large-scale infrastructure projects contributed to countervailing trends including local tensions, local autonomy, and cross-border regional formations.

The postdoctoral fellow will be mainly responsible for 1) developing named entity recognition for infrastructure in Chinese archaeological reports and historical documents; 2) collaborating with a developer and international partners on the further development of the MARKUS platform , esp. a module for machine learning; 3) (co-)authoring articles on machine learning for NER and platform development ; 4) coordinating research and development with other team members.

Profile of the ideal candidate:

• PhD in the field of computer science, digital archaeology, digital humanities, or related field
• demonstrable advanced knowledge of NLP, machine learning methods, including neural networks
• an interest in archaeological and historical research
• a cooperative attitude and willingness to engage in collaborative research
• good communication skills in English
• Chinese language ability is a plus but not required

The deadline to apply for this position is 31 May 2022. Interviews will take place in August 2022. The starting date for this position is 1 October 2022 (exact date negotiable). For a more detailed description of the vacancy, the desired qualifications and skills, and the application procedure see the full vacancy text.

The multidisciplinary team DigitGLAM, which offers consultancy services and expertise to Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) and their networks in the fields of digital curation, digital transformation and the use of digital technologies for user engagement, has a job vacancy for an innovation manager. This position is an exciting and challenging job focused on continuous innovation and development in a transdisciplinary and international context. This is a permanent position as innovation manager of the Industrial Research Fund (IOF) at KU Leuven.

The ideal candidate for this position holds a PhD or a minimum of 5 years of research experience with close affinity to one or more of the following disciplines: digital humanities, (cultural) heritage studies, human computer interaction (HCI) research with applications in the humanities, design, communication science, (art) history, and/or archival science. For a more detailed description of the vacancy and to read the full list of required skills and additional assets, please visit the full vacancy text.

The deadline to apply for this position is 14 April 2022.

KU Leuven and the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) are accepting applications for the full-time FED-tWIN position, “POP Heritage – Popular Heritage Lost & Found. A new approach to the online exploration and curation of the Belgian mass market heritage (20^th-21^st Century).” 50% of this full-time position entails a tenure track position at the KU Leuven Arts Faculty in Cultural Studies with a focus on digital cultural heritage, data analysis, and data visualization in the field of Belgian popular literature. The other 50% position is offered by the KBR. The successful candidate will work half-time at KU Leuven (as a tenure track ZAP) and half-time at the KBR (as a contractual SW2 Workleader). The evaluation and selection of the candidate will be carried out by a committee of representatives from both institutions.

This project will be developed within the framework of the FED-tWIN – Program of sustainable research cooperation between the federal scientific institutes (FSI) and the universities. The supervisors of the project are Sophie Vandepontseele, Director of Contemporary Collections at the KBR, and Prof. Fred Truyen, Professor at the Arts Faculty (Research Unit: Literary Studies, Research Group: Literary Theory and Cultural Studies) and Program Director of the POC Digital Humanities.

The job entails both research and education duties. Candidates need to be well-versed in digitization techniques and methods, data structures, and visualization techniques applied to the Humanities. The researcher preferably has 6-8 years of experience as a postdoc or as an employee at an archival institution after having obtained their PhD.

Please see the full job vacancy text for more details about the position, desired competencies and qualities, and the application procedure.

Applications are accepted up to and including Thursday 24 February 2022. The appointment is expected to start on the first of October 2022.

Voor het team onderzoek binnen KU Leuven Bibliotheken Artes zijn we op zoek naar een nieuwe informatiespecialist onderzoek met focus op digital scholarship in the humanities. Kom jij ons team versterken? Solliciteren voor deze vacature kan tot en met 12 april via de online sollicitatietoepassing.

We zijn op zoek naar iemand met uitstekende IT skills met een specifieke focus op het kruispunt tussen IT en Humane Wetenschappen. Werkervaring in een academische omgeving en kennis van het Open Scholarship landschap strekken tot aanbeveling. Je beschikt ook over uitstekende presentatie- (doceerervaring is een plus) en communicatievaardigheden in zowel het Nederlands als het Engels (zowel mondeling als schriftelijk).

Wij bieden een voltijdse of deeltijdse (80%) tewerkstelling van bepaalde duur (1 jaar), met reële kans op verlenging bij positieve evaluatie. Startdatum is bij voorkeur 1 juni 2021.

De functie houdt onder meer in:

Alle details over deze vacature vind je hier.