The Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) at the Australian Catholic University is offering full-time, 3-year PhD scholarships for doctoral students to undertake research as members of the interdisciplinary team of scholars working on the Mobilising Dutch East India Company Collections for new Global Stories Australian Research Council Linkage Project. These PhD scholarships are offered in History and Literature. Students will benefit from working in the IHSS – a new and vibrant research centre – and the interdisciplinary Linkage Project team that offers opportunities to connect and collaborate with scholars and curators across multiple Australian and international universities and museums. For more information, including application instructions, see https://www.acu.edu.au/
A range of specialisms–including critical ocean studies and the environmental humanities–are welcomed under the disciplinary umbrellas of history and literary studies. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with any questions.
Applications close 11:59pm (AEDT) Sunday 27 November 2022
Research Projects
We invite students to work on the following projects within and across the disciplines of history, literature, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and critical heritage, museum, and archive studies.
Project One. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ representations and interactions with the Dutch East India Company, and other early visitors: We invite doctoral projects exploring Dutch imaginings and representations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, cultures and lands in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Projects may focus exclusively on the Dutch East India Company (VOC) or compare the Dutch with other early visitors to the Australian continent prior to British colonisation.
Project Two: Memorialising The Dutch East India Company in Australia/The Dutch East India Company’s legacy in Australia: We invite projects examining how early Dutch voyagers and shipwreck survivors have been memorialised and remembered in Australia through place names, statues, legends, oral histories, popular histories, and other commemorative practices.
Project Three. Literary (after)lives of Dutch East India Company wreckage in British and Australian literatures: Since the seventeenth century, Dutch East India Company (VOC) shipwrecks have served British and (later) Australian literatures as sites of fascination, contestation, and memorialization. This project asks how Dutch imperial wreckage has configured distinctive and shifting imaginative geographies for British and Anglophone writers and readers.
Project Four: Dutch East India Company shipwrecks, environmental humanities, and oceanic heritage: This project brings the interpretive practices of the environmental humanities and critical ocean studies to bear on shipwrecks, artefactual wreckage, and the plural human, other-than-human, and oceanic presences they express. In conversation with critical heritage studies, the project configures a novel theory for interpreting not only shipwrecks but an incalculably broader (and broadening) array of submersed entanglements through multispecies and multitemporal frames.
Project Five: Slaves, Ships, Seas, and Empire in the Indian Ocean World: Dutch East India Company History and Memory in the Public Sphere. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) looms large in the 20th and 21st centuries. Whereas some people have celebrated VOC ships as symbols of European mastery of the sea, others condemn the company as the antagonist in histories of Indigenous and Black resistance against dispossession and slavery. This project recovers representations of the VOC in maritime Asia and the Indian Ocean World beyond the realm of academic research. It examines how a range of actors across multiple countries, such as curators, artists, governments, and activists, have interpreted the VOC and its legacies in public space, museums and galleries, art, film, websites, music, and theatre. It analyzes Australian efforts to interpret VOC histories and legacies in a transnational framework.
Project Six: Mobilities in the Dutch East India Company: We invite projects that will develop social histories of the movement of people within the Dutch East India Company world, considering particularly the experiences of diverse populations including enslaved and exiled individuals, women and children. A strong knowledge of Dutch will be required to undertake archival approaches to this topic.
PhD Eligibility criteria
- The eligibility criteria for the PhD program at ACU can be found in the Higher Degree Research Regulations
Study mode and location
- Full-time for three (3) years based at St Patrick’s campus in Fitzroy, Melbourne.
Commencement date
- For Domestic applicants: these scholarships are for commencement in Research Term A 2023
- For International applicants: these scholarships are for onshore commencement though temporary offshore commencement may be possible in certain circumstances (refer 1 ‘If you receive an offer’ for further information).
Value and duration
The Successful applicant will be awarded:
- An Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) stipend scholarship of A$29,863 per annum (tax-free, indexed) for domestic candidates or an ACU Stipend Scholarship of A$29,863 (tax-free, indexed) for international candidates. The stipend duration is for three (3) years, subject to satisfactory progress and full-time study mode; plus
- A Research Training Program Fees Offset Scholarship; that is, a tuition fee waiver for three (3) years for domestic candidates or an ACU tuition fee waiver for three (3) years for international candidates.
- Overseas Student Health Care Policy (Single) for international candidates
