A Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (SKO 1352) is available at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo.

The Postdoctoral Research Fellowship is funded by the Research Council of Norway and is associated with the project ‘Narrative Hierarchies: Minor Characters in Byzantine and Medieval History Writing’. The candidate is expected to carry out research as part of the main project. 

The position is available for a period of 2 years (full time). It may be extended for a third year, involving a research stay outside of Norway, subject to the successful acquisition of additional funding from the Research Council of Norway (Funding for Research Stays Abroad for Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellows).

This project aims to explore medieval power and gender relations in historiographical narrative. In medieval histories, kings, emperors, and other elite men typically occupy more prominent roles than labourers, women, eunuchs, slaves, soldiers, and foreigners. The unevenness with which attention, space, and importance are distributed between different types of characters produces hierarchies within these narratives. This research project sets out to analyse these narrative hierarchies, with a particular focus on non-elite and non-male minor characters.

The PI’s work will focus on a corpus of late Byzantine (c. 1200 – c. 1460) histories. Parallel to this work, the successful postdoctoral fellow, the PI, and external collaborators will explore several other contemporary historiographical traditions. These transhistorical studies will aim both to create a framework by which the study of Byzantine history writing can be meaningfully placed in conversation with wider medieval traditions of history writing and narrative and to reflect on the Byzantine tradition’s idiosyncrasies.

The successful applicant will have a PhD or equivalent academic qualifications with a specialization in medieval history and/or literature, have fluent oral and written communication skills in English, and have command of the necessary research language(s) that are essential to the candidate’s proposed project. 

The candidate's research project must be closely connected to ‘Narrative Hierarchies: Minor Characters in Byzantine and Medieval History Writing’. Applications from candidates working on related traditions (e.g., Armenian, Seljuk, early Ottoman, Slavonic, crusader, Ethiopic) are particularly welcome, but candidates will be judged primarily on their thematic relevance and the quality of their research proposal.