The Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet), School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, invites applications for an assistant professorship, focusing on core themes within the centre’s agenda for research on urban societies in the past.

The call is for full-time, three-year position, starting on 1 December 2017 or as soon as possible thereafter.

The position represents an opportunity for an eminent junior researcher to set the agenda for research into the historical archaeology and/or archaeoscience of urban societies and networks from the Hellenistic Period to the Middle Ages, and to participate in one of Europe’s most groundbreaking archaeological research initiatives of this decade.

We are looking to include researchers and their projects in the centre’s work, which integrates questions and problems relating to the humanities and concerning urban development and networks.

The Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet) explores the archaeology and history of urban societies and their networks from the Ancient Mediterranean to medieval Northern Europe and to the Indian Ocean World. We are an interdisciplinary research initiative which integrates new methods from the natural sciences with context-cultural studies rooted in the humanities. Approaching urbanism as a network dynamic, we aim to develop a high-definition archaeology to determine how urban networks catalysed societal and environmental expansions and crises in the past.

We are looking for a researcher with a strong research profile in subjects such as comparative urban archaeology, the material culture of exchanged objects and materials, or the cultural perceptions and activities behind the formation of urban stratigraphies. The research should relate to one or more of the centre’s focus areas, including the era between the Hellenistic Period and the end of the Middle Ages in the regions targeted by the centre’s initiatives: Northern Europe, the Levant or the East Coast of Africa.