RHN 82/2018 | Opportunity
Postdoctoral Research Associate (4 years fixed term), Leeds Trinity University, UK
Closing date for applications: 18 June 2018
Leeds Trinity University’s School of Arts and Communication brings together staff expertise across a range of disciplines to work together for impactful, interdisciplinary and collaborative research, engagement and knowledge exchange. It has excellent long-standing industry links. Our staff are dedicated to delivering an outstanding student experience and outcomes and are supported to do this through their own personal and professional development. Their research, knowledge exchange and scholarship activities enriched by diversity underpin our programmes of study and provide unique opportunities for our students to gain experience on projects which are at the cutting edge of their chosen field of study in an inspiring and challenging learning environment, and a strong focus on the development of professional skills in our students.
The post is part of the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Thinking forward through the past: Linking science, social science and the humanities to inform the sustainable reduction of endemic disease in British livestock farming’. This is an exciting opportunity for a historical researcher to join a new inter-disciplinary team of 14 staff and students, working across 6 universities, on the past, present and future of endemic livestock disease in Britain. Experts in history, geography, rural sociology, economics and epidemiology are coming together in this 4-year project to study the inter-connected past, present and future of two exemplar endemic livestock diseases in cattle and sheep. Working within and across disciplinary clusters, we aim to develop innovative methods, and new disciplinary and inter-disciplinary insights that will advance scholarship, and have a lasting impact on animal welfare and disease control policy and practice by drawing on the historic experience of farmers and farming communities.
We offer
Hours of work will be 35 hours per week.
Salary: circa £26,400 per annum pro rata
In return we offer an excellent range of benefits including generous holiday entitlements, staff development opportunities and a pension scheme.
How to apply?
Further details and the online application are available at: http://www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/jobs
If you have any queries about the application process, please email jobs@leedstrinity.ac.uk or call 0044 113 283 7130.
Leeds Trinity University welcomes applications from all parts of the community and particularly from black and minority ethnic candidates as members of these groups are currently under-represented in this area. All appointments will be based on merit.
Closing date for applications
12 noon on 18th June 2018
Additional Information
In addition to working with Prof Karen Sayer at Leeds Trinity University, the successful applicant will be embedded within a disciplinary cluster (comprising history, oral history and the history of film and photography), work closely with Prof Abigail Woods at Kings College London and staff at the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading, and participate fully in the wider project team. While Woods and Sayer will analyse the content of historical source materials, the history PDRA will analyse the sources themselves, to produce the first in-depth post-WWII analysis of how health and welfare advice to farmers was produced and disseminated, by whom, and with what effects. hese sources include farming magazines, photographs, advertising materials, veterinary and scientific texts and journals, the popular press, government records, grey literature and films. Another important source of information will be in-depth life story recordings produced by an oral historian (University of Newcastle) with farmers, which will be deposited in the MERL archive.
The post holder will be involved in project decision making, in the production and analysis of data and its sharing across disciplines. S/he will also work closely with stakeholders and wider publics. In attending regular project meetings, and through work shadowing members from other disciplines, s/he will be exposed to, and expected to engage with different disciplinary methods, assumptions and traditions, and to use these insights to reflect critically upon their own disciplinary perspectives. In addition to assisting the work of the team they will be encouraged and supported to publish independently.
The post holder will be a twentieth-century British historian with expertise in qualitative research methods. The research project is underpinned by an innovative and highly interactive public engagement programme which is fully integrated into the research.