Quirk Postdoctoral Research Fellowships: Languages of Evidence

Job title:

Quirk Postdoctoral Research Fellowships: Languages of Evidence

Company:

University College London

Job description

About us UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences was founded in 2015. It is based at the heart of UCL’s Bloomsbury campus in a suite of rooms in the South Wing. The IAS is a research-based community of scholars comprising colleagues and doctoral students from across UCL as well as visiting fellows and research collaborators/interlocutors from the UK and internationally, especially in the global South. The IAS is committed to critical thinking and engaged enquiry both within and across conventional disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and aims to provide a creative and generative context in which to question and dislodge habitual practices and modes of thought. In particular, in the context of a major multi-disciplinary university, the IAS harnesses UCL’s extensive expertise across the arts, humanities and social sciences to investigate received wisdom, to bring the aesthetic and the political into dialogue with one another, to foster collaborative cutting-edge research, to identify and address the urgent ethical and intellectual challenges that face us today, and to confront our responsibilities as citizens of an increasingly contracting and inter-connected world, exploring our place (historically as well as spatially) within it.The Quirk Postdoctoral Fellowships are funded from the generous bequest of Professor the Lord Charles Randolph Quirk, 1920-2017, linguist and life peer, who began his academic career as a lecturer at UCL and was Professor here from 1960 to 1981. Professor Quirk was renowned for his pioneering Survey of English Usage, Europe’s first Corpus Linguistics research centre, which resulted in a series of publications that became standard works of reference, both on the English language itself and on how to approach the study of linguistic form and usage. Professor Quirk’s endowment is to support ‘humanistic scholarship’, broadly conceived.About the role UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) is seeking to appoint two one-year Quirk Postdoctoral Fellows to work on cross-disciplinary projects relevant to this year’s theme Languages of Evidence to begin on 1 October 2025.In the spirit of Professor Quirk’s wide-ranging intellectual outlook and his own specific interests in language and literature, we have chosen Languages of Evidence as the research theme for the fellowships in 2025-6. The two successful candidates will each design, research and write up their own cross-disciplinary project to explore how questions of language shape the nature, use, status and credibility of evidence. We hope that their work will build on the findings of the first two rounds of Quirk Fellows, who focussed on Languages of the Anthropocene (2023-4) and Languages of the Future (2024-5). The two fellows will also act as co-convenors of a UCL research cluster to develop further cross-disciplinary collaboration on languages of evidence. This cluster will be a central part of a wider, pan-UCL project on Evidence, which the IAS will convene as one of our contributions to work marking the bi-centenary of the founding of UCL.We invite proposals for one-year research projects on any linguistic aspect of thinking about problems of evidence, in any period of history and in any geographical context. This could include (but is not limited to): terminologies and repertoires of evidence (e.g. terms such as ‘self-evident’ or ‘experiential’ can mean very different things in different contexts); grammars, rhetorics and/or poetics of evidence; languages of evaluation of evidence; the use of language as evidence; problems of interpretation and translation in the public realm, especially law or healthcare; the consequences of using algorithmic machine languages to handle large data-sets, mine text or generate text.

These ideas are intended to be suggestive rather than prescriptive. The purpose of the Quirk Postdoctoral Fellowships in Languages of Evidence is to stimulate cross-disciplinary exchange in this field, to break down intellectual silos, democratise debate, and decolonise categories and concepts. The theme Languages of Evidence will be a key element of the IAS Evidence Project, and the appointed Postdoctoral Fellows will be encouraged to explore the implications of their specific research topic for the wider project. As a key aim of that project is to work towards a new language of evidence for use both in the academy and in public policy, we expect that the insights of the Languages of Evidence cluster will be particularly significant to the general outcomes.About you We welcome applications from early-career academics pursuing humanistic scholarship in language and literature, including the history of language, the history of concepts, intellectual history, history and philosophy of science, history of law, epistemology, the ethics and politics of language, translation and untranslatability, theory and practice of interpreting, and bilingualism and multilingualism. Appropriate methodologies include cultural and historical inquiry, genre and discourse theory, transhistorical and transcultural comparison, translation theory, linguistic and socio-linguistic analysis, philosophy of language and digital humanities. We especially encourage projects involving research on the global South and/or projects adopting cross-cultural or trans-historical perspectives.These Fellowships are intended for recently viva-ed PhD students and are open to candidates with a completed PhD in a relevant field of humanistic scholarship, awarded no more than 24 months before 1 October 2025. Exemption from this criterion may be granted for reasons occurring after the date of the viva voce examination such as: maternity leave, illness, family/caring commitments.What we offer The Quirk Postdoctoral Fellows will be provided with mentoring and training by IAS academic staff both to develop their Languages of Evidence project and to help them to prepare publications from their PhD and make a successful transition from PhD to postdoctoral research. Each Fellow will carry out an individual project, but they will benefit from working together and the IAS Directors will arrange for reading groups and other joint activities as appropriate. The Fellows will also collaborate in convening a research cluster to draw on the expertise of the many UCL colleagues with interests in this field.At the Institute of Advanced Studies, you will become a vital part of the IAS community, which comprises research staff as well as a vibrant group of visiting scholars from all over the world and academics from across UCL, who participate in our large number of multi-disciplinary research centres, reading groups and other initiatives.Our commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion As London’s Global University, we know diversity fosters creativity and innovation. We are committed to equality of opportunity, to being fair and inclusive, and to being a place where all belong. We therefore particularly encourage applications from candidates who are likely to be underrepresented in UCL’s workforce.Available documents

Expected salary

Location

North West London

Job date

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 02:43:06 GMT

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