The LAGOOS project (“A Life in Ancient Greek: The ‘Secret’ Diary of Karl Benedikt Hase”) is looking to recruit a team member at the level of a doctoral student (‘pre-doc’) on a 4-year fixed-term contract to begin in March 2023 or as soon as possible thereafter. 

The LAGOOS project is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and hosted at the University of Innsbruck’s Institute for Classical Philology and Neo-Latin Studies under PI William M. Barton (FWF identifier Y 1519-G). The project has as its principle aims: 1) a digital edition of the surviving nine volumes of Hase’s Greek diary, alongside the condensed manuscript of excerpts and; 2) a series of analytic studies answering questions about the scholar’s use of Greek, his place in the history of Classical and Byzantine scholarship and his role in Europe’s philhellenic movement.

For their work towards the digital edition of the text, the doctoral student will be responsible for the transcription of the text of the nine complete volumes of Hase’s diaries, as well as the manuscript of excerpts made by Dübner. This work will be supported extensively by the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) tool TRANSKRIBUS, where a model designed for Hase’s Greek hand has already been developed. This transcription of the diary will constitute the first part of the editorial work towards the digital edition of the text.

As part of the project’s analytical work, the doctoral student will be responsible for a study of Hase’s use of the Greek language in his diaries, the largest single corpus of ‘Ancient Greek’ text composed in the 19th-century yet identified. Here attention should be paid, on the one hand, to the linguistic features of Hase’s Greek (with numerous Atticizing features alongside examples of high-Byzantine and occasionally Modern Greek vocabulary, for example), as well as to the socio-linguistic context of Hase’s choice of expression. The work towards this study of Hase’s use of the Greek language in his diaries can be foreseen as material for a PhD thesis.

Qualifications
Required:

• An MA degree (or equivalent) in Classical Philology, Ancient or Byzantine Greek Studies (or similar);
• excellent Ancient Greek reading comprehension;
• evidence of training in palaeography and manuscript studies;
• evidence of experience in linguistic research;
• the ability to work productively in a team;
• excellent English, and reading knowledge of German and/or French.

Desired:

• Experience in digital humanities;
• Modern Greek skills;
• Latin reading comprehension;
• experience in archival research;
• editorial competences.