IAS Quirk Postdoctoral Fellowships: Languages of the Future

UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) is seeking to appoint two one-year Quirk Postdoctoral Fellows to work on cross-disciplinary projects relevant to the theme Languages of the Future, starting on 1 October 2024. The two successful candidates will design, research and write up their own cross-disciplinary project to explore how questions of language shape human conceptions of the future, especially in times of radical uncertainty. The two fellows will also act as co-convenors of a UCL research cluster to develop further cross-disciplinary collaboration on this topic.

The theme of Languages of the Future arises from the work of the first two Quirk IAS Fellows (2023-24), who focus on the theme Languages of the Anthropocene. Their research on the literary, philosophical and social histories of discourses of environmental crisis provides ample evidence that the study of language in all its aspects is fundamental to understanding the current human predicament. In building on their work, the 2024-5 cluster relates to questions of hierarchy and translation, especially in relation to the politics of language. The proposed research cluster also corresponds to recent moves in both philosophy and the history of politica l thought away from concepts towards languages, a direction of travel that leads them to revive the practice of making connections between philosophy, linguistics and philology that characterised Quirk’s oeuvre. More information about the theme can be found in the job description.

These Fellowships are open to candidates with a completed PhD in a relevant field of humanistic scholarship, awarded no more than 24 months before 1 October 2024. These posts are intended for recently viva-ed PhD students.

The IAS was founded in 2015 and is based at the heart of UCL’s Bloomsbury campus in a suite of rooms in the South Wing. It 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 IAS 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, 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’ in the fields of language and literature, broadly conceived.

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