Quirk Postdoctoral Research Fellowships: Languages of Evidence

UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (IAS) is a research-based community of scholars comprising colleagues and doctoral students from UCL as well as visiting fellows and research collaborators/interlocutors from the UK and internationally, especially in the global South. The Quirk Postdoctoral Fellowships are funded from the generous bequest of Professor the Lord Charles Randolph Quirk, 1920-2017, linguist and life peer, who began his academic career as a lecturer at UCL and was Professor here from 1960 to 1981.

The IAS is seeking to appoint two one-year Quirk Postdoctoral Fellows to work on cross-disciplinary projects relevant to this year's theme Languages of Evidence to begin on 1 October 2025. The two successful candidates will each design, research and write up their own cross-disciplinary project to explore how questions of language shape the nature, use, status and credibility of evidence. The Fellows will also act as co-convenors of a UCL research cluster to develop further cross-disciplinary collaboration on languages of evidence. This cluster will be a central part of a wider, pan-UCL project on Evidence, which the IAS will convene as one of our contributions to work marking the bi-centenary of the founding of UCL. We invite proposals for one-year research projects on any linguistic aspect of thinking about problems of evidence, in any period of history and in any geographical context. This could include (but is not limited to): terminologies and repertoires of evidence (e.g. te rms such as ‘self-evident’ or ‘experiential’ can mean very different things in different contexts); grammars, rhetorics and/or poetics of evidence; languages of evaluation of evidence; the use of language as evidence; problems of interpretation and translation in the public realm, especially law or healthcare; the consequences of using algorithmic machine languages to handle large data-sets, mine text or generate text. These ideas are intended to be suggestive rather than prescriptive. The purpose of the Quirk Postdoctoral Fellowships in Languages of Evidence is to stimulate cross-disciplinary exchange in this field, to break down intellectual silos, democratise debate, and decolonise categories and concepts. The theme Languages of Evidence will be a key element of the IAS Evidence Project, and the Fellows will be encouraged to explore the implications of their specific research topic for the wider project. As a key aim of that project is to work towards a new language of evidence for use both in the academy and in public policy, we expect that the insights of the Languages of Evidence cluster will be particularly significant to the general outcomes.

We welcome applications from early-career academics pursuing humanistic scholarship in language and literature, including the history of language, the history of concepts, intellectual history, history and philosophy of science, history of law, epistemology, the ethics and politics of language, translation and untranslatability, theory and practice of interpreting, and bilingualism and multilingualism. Appropriate methodologies include cultural and historical inquiry, genre and discourse theory, transhistorical and transcultural comparison, translation theory, linguistic and socio-linguistic analysis, philosophy of language and digital humanities. We especially encourage projects involving research on the global South and/or projects adopting cross-cultural or trans-historical perspectives. These Fellowships are intended for recently viva-ed PhD students and are open to candidates with a completed PhD in a relevant field of humanistic scholarship, awarded no more than 24 months be fore 1 October 2025.

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