Post-Doctoral Research Assistant

Full-time, Fixed term (34 months), 35 hours per week 

From 1 March 2024 to 31 December 2026

We are looking for a postdoctoral research assistant to work on the AHRC-funded project, ‘Beyond Borders: The Second World War, National Identities and Empire in the UK’.

The Opportunity:

You will join a team working on the AHRC funded project, ‘Beyond Borders: The Second World War, National Identities and Empire in the UK’, led by Dr Wendy Ugolini, University of Edinburgh (PI), Professor Martin Johnes, Swansea University (CI) and Nadine Wright (Imperial War Museum). Through extensive oral history and life writing archival fieldwork, this project will provide a significant intervention in Second World War historiography. It will produce a monograph (co-authored by the PI, CI and two postdoctoral research assistants) and a directory of UK oral history datasets which will be made searchable online for use by future scholars, archivists, and researchers. In conjunction with the Imperial War Museum, the project will also produce new resources for schools. The project is the first comparative study to integrate England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales and their wartime relationships to Britishness and the British Empire into a single frame.  It will critically reassess how the peoples of the UK conceptualised their national identity in wartime, whether as imperial, multinational or singular, and the extent to which this shifted as they moved across the Empire at war.

This post will be based in the School of History, Classics & Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. The central duties will be conducting research in archives and oral history collections primarily in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and England, and co-writing a monograph and journal article.

An outline of the project can be found here: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FY002636%2F1

Your skills and attributes for success:

• a completed PhD or equivalent in History (or a cognate discipline) which demonstrates an area of research expertise pertinent to this project, for example: oral history, life-writing, Second World War histories, identity studies. 
• Evidence of active engagement, personal role, and contribution to writing and publishing research papers, particularly for refereed journals.
• Ability to demonstrate significant independence of focus and direction in research – determining ‘what, why, when and with whom’ to progress work.
• Experience of creating and working with a lightweight database and inputting project data onto related spreadsheet.
• A commitment to continuous personal development

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