Postdoctoral Research Associate (History)

The Role and Department

Following recent expansion, Durham University History Department is now one of the largest centres in the UK for the study of History. We are consistently ranked amongst the top departments in the country by the Complete University Guide, the Times and Sunday Times, and the Guardian University Guide. We place research at the very heart of our varied undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, inducting our students into a community of historians from the outset.

This post offers an exciting opportunity to make an important contribution to the development of the History department’s research while allowing you excellent opportunities to develop your career in an exciting and progressive institution. For more information, please visit our Department pages at .

The Role

The Department of History at Durham University seeks to appoint a talented researcher and scholar to the role of Postdoctoral Research Associate to work on the research project ‘Modelling the Black Death and Social Connectivity in Medieval England’, led by Dr Alex Brown and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Utilising the latest computer modelling developed in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, we will simulate the spread of the Black Death in England in order to test hypotheses about the spread of the disease and about the connectedness of medieval society. Using historical and archaeological sources, we will reconstruct the broad characteristics of the late medieval popu lation on the eve of the Black Death, such as their location, age, sex, and occupation. This is the ‘static’ part of our model. We will then infer their ‘dynamic’ behavioural patterns, such as where they spent their time and whom they encountered in their daily lives. In order to achieve this, the successful candidate will conduct high-quality research of new archival material and will draw upon a wide range of secondary material in order to construct the necessary datasets that will feed into our computer model.

The successful candidate will join an exciting interdisciplinary team of researchers and will work closely with Co-Investigators in Archaeology (Professors Christopher Gerrard and Rebecca Gowland and a postdoctoral research associate) and in Physics (Professor Frank Krauss and a postdoctoral research associate). The History postdoctoral research associate will be responsible for collating much of the underlying historical data, including drawing material from existing datasets derived from the lay subsidies and poll taxes, and constructing new datasets on, for example, the major communication networks of medieval England. You will collaborate with colleagues in Archaeology to establish variable mortality rates during the Black Death, and with colleagues in Physics to prepare these datasets for our computer simulation.

We welcome applications from those with research interests in the broad field of medieval social and economic history and we are particularly eager to hear from applicants with expertise in either digital humanities, medical humanities or who have experience working with large datasets or mapping software such as GIS.

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