Research Fellow in History

About the role

This three-year post will support the project ‘University Students as Migrants: A New History of Educational Mobility in Western Europe, 1960s–1980s’, which is jointly funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the German Research Foundation (DFG).

The project traces changing migration policies and discourses in Western Europe since the 1960s. It scrutinises how student mobility has developed and changed in the context of local, national and European migration policies. It investigates the relationship between restrictive migration policies in Western Europe and schemes that facilitated the transnational mobility of students. Moreover, it seeks to analyse how such mobility intersected with other forms of migration (such as flight, exile and labour migration) and what this meant for mobile students who often faced many of the issues that were central to migrant experiences more broadly. 

The UK component of this Anglo-German research partnership is led by Dr Daniel Laqua (Northumbria University), in cooperation with Prof. Isabella Löhr (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History), who is responsible for the German part of this venture.

You will conduct archival research on student mobility in the United Kingdom and Belgium (complementing the research that a Potsdam-based Research Fellow will undertake with a focus on West Germany and France). You will coordinate one particular thematic strand of the wider team’s research, namely ‘Student Experiences and Agency’, and you will take an active role in knowledge-exchange activities involving two partner organisations, the European Students’ Union (ESU) and the Global Student Forum (GSF). You will contribute to various events, including an academic conference held in Potsdam. You will prepare various research outputs, notably by contributing to a co-authored monograph that will bring together the project findings.

The role is fixed term for 36 months. We anticipate that online interviews will take place on 17 January 2025, for an appointment start soon thereafter.

About the team

You will work within the Department of Humanities at Northumbria University, an 80-person-strong community of scholars. The department’s ‘Histories of Activism’ and ‘Global and Transnational History’ research groups will provide a supportive environment for your research. Links to the project team in Potsdam will be a central aspect of the project. In addition to close cooperation with the Principal Investigators (Dr Daniel Laqua and Professor Isabella Löhr) and the Potsdam-based Research Fellow, you will also receive support from the expertise of two further academic collaborators, Dr Edward Anderson at Northumbria University and Prof. Marcia Schenck at the University of Potsdam.

About you

You should hold a PhD in History or another relevant discipline. Your research background should equip you to handle the different dimensions of this project, which encompass national contexts (UK, Belgium), transnational processes as well as international institutional frameworks.

Further information about the requirements of this role is available in the person specification.

If you would like an informal discussion about the role, please contact Daniel Laqua (daniel.laqua@northumbria.ac.uk).

https://work4.northumbria.ac.uk/#en/sites/CX_1001/requisitions/preview/2942

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