Erasmus University Rotterdam is recruiting two PhD candidates for a fully funded project on the transimperial history of women’s work between 1600 and 1900. The positions are based in the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication and are part of a collaborative research team led by Dr. Natália da Silva Perez. The work will combine archival history with digital and computational methods in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Key facts
- Two PhD candidates are being sought for the project.
- The research examines how European colonial expansion shaped ideas and experiences of women’s labour between 1600 and 1900.
- Applicants choose one case: Pernambuco or Atlantic Africa, including Senegambia, the Gold Coast, or Angola.
- The project uses archival research alongside handwritten text recognition, multilingual datasets, natural language processing, statistical analysis, and qualitative history.
- The appointment includes a competitive monthly salary, employment benefits, research experience, teaching exposure, and an international academic setting in Rotterdam.
What does this mean for PhD applicants?
For applicants, this is a route into a funded doctoral post that sits at the intersection of history, gender studies, colonial studies, and digital humanities. The successful candidates will not only pursue independent dissertation research, but also contribute to shared datasets, archival work, conference presentations, publishing, and teaching.
The application calls for a research master’s degree or another relevant master’s degree completed by the starting date, strong English, and at least one additional language relevant to the chosen case. For Pernambuco, that can include Portuguese, Dutch, or Spanish. For Atlantic Africa, relevant languages can include Portuguese, Dutch, French, English, or Danish. Applicants also need to identify two archives they plan to consult and explain why they matter for the research.
- Research focus: women’s work, gendered labour, and colonial/transimperial history.
- Method mix: archival research, Transkribus, digital humanities, and computational analysis.
- Project cases: Pernambuco or Atlantic Africa.
- Academic output: article-based dissertation and journal publications.
What will the PhD candidates study?
The project asks how women’s lived work may have matched or contradicted dominant ideas about gendered labour. It looks at domestic, agricultural, commercial, economic, and social labour, and at the ways colonial rule, race, class, slavery, migration, family structures, religion, law, and culture shaped that work.
Rather than treating colonial societies separately, the research uses a transimperial lens. That means tracing how ideas, institutions, texts, and people moved between European metropolitan centres and territories in Africa, the Americas, and other colonial settings.
How will the research be carried out?
The selected researchers will help build and curate multilingual historical datasets using handwritten and printed sources, correspondence, and administrative records. They will work with archival documents in multiple languages and use Transkribus to help transcribe handwritten material, while manually checking and correcting the results.
The project also expects candidates to use qualitative historical analysis and may involve interpretivist approaches, social reproduction theory, intersectionality, corpus-based text analysis, and statistical methods. The doctoral work is designed to develop both historical expertise and technical skills.
Which case should applicants choose?
Applicants will focus on one of two historical cases. Pernambuco offers a Brazilian colonial setting with research possibilities around women’s work, labour systems, and connections with European centres. Atlantic Africa includes possible research areas such as Senegambia, the Gold Coast, and Angola, with archival work across African and Atlantic worlds.
Language preparation matters for both tracks. The project says strong knowledge of at least one relevant archival language is required, and willingness to develop additional language skills is considered positively. Candidates with working knowledge of further relevant languages may have an advantage.
Why is this project academically significant?
The project brings together women’s history, labour history, African history, Atlantic history, and colonial history with digital humanities methods. It is designed to examine how historical experiences of women’s work were shaped by power, empire, and unequal social hierarchies, while also giving early-career researchers training in archival and computational research.
For doctoral candidates, the post offers more than dissertation work. It includes research collaboration, an article-based thesis format, conference participation, publication opportunities, and teaching in the History Department. That mix makes the position relevant to applicants aiming for academic careers as well as those building digital history expertise.
