King’s College Cambridge invites applications for two four-year Junior Research Fellowship from those who are completing or have recently completed a doctorate and who intend to pursue a research project on some aspect of the study of immateriality or representation. One fellowship will be awarded for a project on immateriality and one for a project on representation.

A Junior Research Fellowship is a postdoctoral position tenable for up to 4 years. Applications are welcome from graduates of any university. Candidates will usually have completed their PhD, and must not have undertaken more than 2 years of postdoctoral work by 1st October 2019 (i.e. your PhD cannot have been granted before 30th September 2017).

Immateriality
Materialism has long been an important theme in both historical studies (Marx etc.) and in philosophy. In the last few years the theme of materiality, the way the physical properties of an object have cultural consequences, has inspired a vast body of research, giving rise to talk of a ‘material turn’ in literary and historical studies. But even properly to understand the role of material, we badly need to explore materiality’s converse, immateriality. What is the immaterial, if indeed it ‘is’ anything at all? This call for applications is open to investigations of immateriality in its own right, for example as a concept in the history of philosophy; it is also open to projects concerned with the relation between the material (artefactual, biological, geological, etc.) and the immaterial.  The latter might include, for example, research on intimations of immateriality, such as hauntings or symbolism perceived in material objects; analysis of the intellectual means by which the material is ordered, such as ‘form’, ‘scheduling’, ‘discipline’ or ‘evolution’; study of the digital imagination as it relates to technological and human constraints; the building of ideology into the design of objects or infrastructure, such as ‘anti-homeless architecture’; or research on immaterial aspects of the human body in the context of biological reductionism.

This post-doctoral Fellowship is intended to encourage such research by enabling the successful candidate to complete a substantial research project on some aspect of immateriality in the context of recent advances in any of the following range of disciplines: philosophy, history, archaeology, classics, anthropology, psychology, architecture, literature, art and music studies, psychology.

The ideal candidate for this Junior Research Fellowship will have a strong background in one or more disciplines within the Arts, Humanities, or Social Sciences and have completed an outstanding doctoral thesis. It is not a requirement that the candidate’s doctoral studies or the work that they submit in support of their application should have concerned questions of immateriality, but candidates will be expected to show in their applications both how their future work relates to the work that they have already done, and to explain clearly how their proposed project relates to existing studies on their chosen theme. The successful candidate will be expected to engage broadly with the whole college community and to organise academic activities in the form of seminars/workshops/conferences (for which the College will provide modest funding).

Representation
The issue of representation is ubiquitous. It concerns how the world and all that is in it is and has been represented in art and literature; how systems of representation in politics, law, etc. do their job; how academic studies make their choices of what is representative evidence to answer their questions; whether music in any way represents the world. Whatever form of expression is chosen, whether it is by words, pictures, sounds or actions, the question of how that form of expression relates to the material about which it makes its statements is a pressing one. Yet that question is widely neglected. On what grounds does one thing or person ‘stand for’ another thing or person? Little enough concern is expressed about how members of parliament perform their role in a representative democracy, and even less about how historians represent the people of the past. Beyond formal political institutions – e.g. in context of (social) media and public discourse – who gets to speak ‘for’ whom? Within social sciences, tests for statistical significance stand in place of considerations of whether what is quantified itself adequately represents the behaviour of the group being investigated. While much discussion in the visual arts has concerned how the process of mimesis might work, very much less consideration has been given to the different ways in which different mimetic conventions represent the world differently. What might be the consequences and significance – in art, in theory, in political systems – of not being represented or of not being represented in a particular way?

It is time that what artists, writers, musicians, and scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences are doing when they claim to represent other people and the world, was put higher on the scholarly agenda, and that what it is that links issues of historical truth and proper government, artistic mimesis and sampling of populations, is made central to discussions of theory and methodology.

This post-doctoral Fellowship is intended to place the question of representation higher on the scholarly agenda by enabling the successful candidate to complete a substantial research project on some aspect of representation. Projects may concern issues of representation as they affect work in any arts, humanities or social science discipline (including the history of science). They may be heavily theoretical or concentrate on particular case studies within individual disciplines. But they will seek to showcase representation as an issue.

The ideal candidate for this Junior Research Fellowship will have a strong background in one or more disciplines within the arts, humanities, or social sciences and have completed an outstanding doctoral thesis. It is not a requirement that the candidate’s doctoral studies or the work that they submit in support of their application should have highlighted issues of representation, but candidates will be expected to show in their applications both how their future work relates to the work that they have already done, and that they are able to situate their proposed project in relation to the issue of representation. The successful candidate will be expected to engage broadly with the whole college community and to organise academic activities in the form of seminars/workshops/conferences (for which the College will provide modest funding).