Postcolonial Studies Initiative

Assistant Professor in African American History

Stanford University

Deadline: Sep 30 2026 - 11:55pm PDT

The Department of African and African American Studies (DAAAS) at Stanford University invites applications for a tenure-track appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor in African American History. We seek scholars whose research focuses on any historical period, from the colonial era to the present, and whose work advances the study of African American lives, histories, and experiences.

We welcome applications from candidates working across a broad range of historical approaches and methodologies. Areas of specialization may include, but are not limited to, inter-imperial histories of slavery, emancipation, and freedom; the Black Atlantic and Caribbean encounters; race and medicine; Black political thought; the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; Black internationalisms and culture.

Successful applicants will be expected to teach our undergraduate Foundations of African American Studies course (which covers a broad chronological period and multiple disciplinary perspectives), supervise undergraduate research, and participate in the department’s interdisciplinary curriculum. While DAAAS does not yet have a graduate program, the successful candidate may find opportunities to work with graduate students via Stanford’s Department of History.

To be considered, applicants must hold a Ph.D in African American History or a closely related field, or demonstrate equivalent professional distinction at the time of appointment.

Candidates currently enrolled in a PhD or equivalent international degree-granting program will be considered, provided the degree is in hand by the start date.

Applicants must have demonstrated a commitment to effective teaching and mentoring and the ability to establish and sustain a world-class research trajectory.

Assistant Professor in African American History - Stanford University, California, United States The Department of African and African American Studies (DAAAS) at Stanford University invites applications for a tenure-track appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor in African American History. We seek scholars whose research focuses on any historical period, from the colonial era to the pre...

PhD student in the cultural study of resistance (digital humanities)

Deadline: 21/9/2026

Position description
The Faculty of Social Sciences and Solvay Business School, Research Group ECHO: Media, Culture & Politics, and the Faculty of Languages and Humanities, Research Group CLIC: Centre for Literary & Intermedial Crossings are looking for a PhD-student with a doctoral grant.

As part of a newly created Brussels Centre for Interdisciplinary Resistance Studies (Inter-RESIST), you conduct research with a view to obtaining a doctoral thesis.

Research theme: The research focuses on how resistance is enacted and mediated across time and media. Through cross-historical and cross-media analyses of archival, textual, visual, and digital sources, itstudies how repertoires of resistance evolve and travel. This includes the study of ‘everyday resistance’, ‘constructive resistance’, ‘reverse discourse’ and ‘networked dissent’ (see, i.a., James C. Scott, Mona Lilja). Inter-RESIST focuses on civilian resistance against dehumanization in Belgium as well as transnationally throughout the twentieth century, and specifically resistance to the Holocaust; resistance to post-war racism targeting migrants and their descendants; and resistance to the genocide against Palestinians and its historical antecedents.

PhD student in the cultural study of resistance (digital humanities) PhD student in the cultural study of resistance (digital humanities)

The School of Law of Utrecht University invites applications for a PhD candidate (4 years) within the NWO Vidi project: “With greater power must come great responsibility: attributing data protection compliance to those with real control.” This interdisciplinary project explores who really holds power in today’s web ecosystem, where website and app owners depend on powerful third-party tools, and how this should redefine responsibility under the General Data Protection Regulation. Apply by 16 July 2026! See here for more information:

www.uu.nl

Pre-call for Applications: 12 Funded PhD Positions | International Research Training Group (IRTG) Cultures of Repair

The International Research Training Group (IRTG) Cultures of Repair, jointly convened by the University of Potsdam (Germany) and the University of Melbourne (Australia), is pleased to announce a pre-call for applications for 12 funded doctoral positions commencing on 1 February 2027.

The programme explores repair as a critical, creative, and future-oriented practice that sustains social, cultural, and ecological life. We welcome project proposals that engage with at least one of our three Research Areas:
- Environments of Repair
- Reparative Readings
- Repairing Relations

They offer:
- 6 funded PhD positions at the University of Potsdam (65% TV-L E13)
- 6 funded PhD scholarships at the University of Melbourne
- international supervision across literary studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, gender studies, q***r studies, media studies, and history
- a structured joint qualification programme including one year in Potsdam and one year in Melbourne
- a jointly awarded PhD degree from both universities

Programme duration: February 2027 – July 2030
Application deadline: 12 July 2026

Find more info here:

Homepage Pre-call for applications for 12 funded PhDs commencing on 1 February 2027. The information provided on this page is intended to help prospective applicants prepare their application materials in advance. The application portal will open on 1 July 2026. The deadline for applications is 12 July 2026.

Thank you all for joining us at the Rita Segato NOG Lecture this evening. There might still be some spots available for the panel on Violence, power and masculinity tomorrow, so make sure to register! More info here:

Panel on Violence, power and masculinity with Rita Segato – June 9, 2026 This panel brings into dialogue the work of Rita Segato on sexual violence, masculinity, and the modern-colonial transformation of patriarchy. Building on Segato’s influential theorization of sexual violence as a structured practice of power—articulated through the “mandate of masculinity” a...

The PCI Summer Newsletter is available! Read it here: https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?e=[UNIQID]&u=ab50c595db722886e10aad6ac&id=70e68f51c3

Call for Global Slavery History Fellowships (GSHF) in Amsterdam

Deadline April 1, 2026

A coalition of Amsterdam based Archives, Museums and Historical institutes* with the generous support of the Insinger Foundation has taken the initiative for a five-year programme that offers three three-month long fellowships per year for curators, archivists and historians in the field of slavery history.
The fellowships are open to professionals working on the history of slavery in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian archipelago, linked to the Dutch involvement in slave trade and slave labour.

More info:

Call for Global Slavery History Fellowships (GSHF) in Amsterdam The fellowships are open to professionals working on the history of slavery in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian archipelago, linked to the Dutch involvement in slave trade and slave labour.

PhD position on Images and Justice

University of Copenhagen

Deadline: 27 May

The Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen is inviting applications for one three-year PhD scholarship with expected starting date September 1st, 2026 or shortly thereafter.

The PhD will be part of the ERC Consolidator Grant, Before the Image – The Political Ontology of Images for Legal and Social Justice. The project will investigate how images used to document violence, war crimes and human rights violations are created – not only in the moment when they are taken or viewed, but also in processes of designing image technologies and developing camera and visual literacy skills.

As part of this larger project, the PhD will investigate how visual literacy, including memory, perceptions of truth, and training, impact ways in which images are seen, focusing on how experts and non-experts view images that document violence. It is expected that the PhD candidate will carry out ethnographic fieldwork at open source investigation trainings and do interviews with trainers and participants at these trainings in order to study the processes through which open source investigators are taught to view images for the purposes of verification, geo- and chronolocation etc.

More info:

employment.ku.dk

Doing Gender Lecture – Zaida Capote Cruz (Havana, 1967) – May 8, 2026

—— new location:
BAK (pauwstraat 13A, Utrecht)

Universes of Cuban Feminism in the 20th Century: Women in Revolution

Time: 17:15 – 19:00 hrs.
Location: Utrecht Janskerkhof 15A, 0.04
Chair: Jamila Mascat

This lecture is jointly organized by the NOG (Netherlands Research School
of Gender Studies) with the IOS Gender, Diversity and Global Justice Platform

What have women done during the Cuban Revolution, and what has the Revolution done for Cuban women? My talk offers a historical overview of Cuban women’s struggle for their rights and the scope of their emancipation throughout the 20th century. Engaging with the work of several Cuban authors in film and literature, it explores key milestones achieved by Cuban feminists since the 1959 Revolution and traces the evolving place of women in Cuban society up to the present day, with all its ongoing uncertainties.

Biography
Zaida Capote Cruz (Havana, 1967) is a senior researcher at the José Antonio Portuondo Valdor Institute of Literature and Linguistics (National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM – location Havana, Cuba), where she coordinates the Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda Chair and leads a project on Cuban feminist journals between 1900 and 1958. She is also a member of the Cuban Academy of Language (Academia Cubana de la Lengua).
Her work focuses on Latin American narrative and essay writing, archival research and critical editions, as well as cultural analysis related to the history of feminism in Cuba and the representation of women.

She has published the books Vindictas. Cuentistas cubanas (2025), El ensayo y la crítica literarios de la diáspora cubana. Índice bibliográfico (2023), Estado crítico (2023), Tribulaciones de España en América. Tres episodios de historia y ficción (2021), Loynacianas (2017), La nación íntima (2007), Contra el silencio. Otra lectura de Dulce María Loynaz (2005), and Tres ensayos ajenos (1994).

Doing Gender Lecture by Dr. Zaida Capote – in English and Spanish

Doing Gender Lecture – Zaida Capote Cruz – May 8, 2026 The Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies organises the DOING GENDER Lecture Series in cooperation with her partners. These lectures stress the importance of doing gender work combined with an active involvement in the practice of gender theory and research. The concept of DOING GENDER suppo...

CFP International Conference:
Food and Memory: Practices, Narratives, and Afterlives of the Past

University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo, Italy
September 17-18, 2026

Keynotes: Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Alessandro Portelli (University of Rome La Sapienza)

Food is one of the most powerful, yet underexplored, sites of memory. Practices such as cooking, eating, and commensality often act as embodied archives of lived experience, cultural knowledge, and intergenerational transmission. From Proust’s madeleine to Benjamin’s reflections on memory, materiality, and everyday life, food has long been recognized as a trigger of recollection. Situated at the intersection of the historical, the cultural, the social, the political, the sensory, and the material, food offers a particularly fruitful lens through which to explore memory and is a privileged space for negotiating identity, loss, displacement, and historical trauma across space and time.
Despite a growing literature on food in relation to identity and mobility, the explicit dialogue between food studies and memory studies remains limited. Anthropological scholarship has shown how meals and ritual food practices embed the past in everyday life and social relations (Sutton 2001). More recent work in the field of oral history has emphasized the multisensorial nature of remembering, showing how memory is evoked through taste, smell, and touch (Proglio 2025). Giuseppe Di Porto’s recollection of hunger in Auschwitz, in dialogue with Alessandro Portelli (2025), explores the loss and recovery of humanity, and offers a reflection on the methods and practices of oral history, on the distinction between “testimony” and “narrative,” and on the processes of memory. Drawing on theories of memory studies, in particular postmemory (Hirsch 1997, 2012), this conference seeks to address this gap by bringing together scholars who critically examine the intersections of food, memory, and the past from a cultural, historical, and social perspective.
We invite contributions that explore how food practices, narratives, and afterlives shape both individual and collective memories, and how they participate in the construction, negotiation, or contestation of histories, especially in contexts marked by historical and cultural trauma. Particular attention is given to postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, to the gendered and embodied dimensions of food memory, and to the processes of adaptation and hybridization through which memories are transformed rather than simply preserved.
Possible themes include, but are not limited, to:
• Food and forms of memory: cultural, social, embodied, sensorial, postmemory, multidirectional, counter-memory, transnational
• Food and memory in contexts of migration, diaspora, and “subcultures”
• Food, historical trauma, and the afterlives of war, genocide, displacement, exile, colonialism, and imperialism
• Food, nostalgia, and constructions of home, tradition, and heritage
• Oral history, food, memorial processes and methodological approaches
• Postcolonial, decolonial, feminist, and intersectional approaches to food and memory
• Gendered food practices, domestic spaces, and the transmission of memory
• Q***r, nonbinary, racial, and racialized identities articulated through food
• Hybridization, adaptation, and culinary pluralism

• Everyday food practices as archives
• Silence, absence, and loss expressed through food
• Food in film, literature, visual media, and oral history
• Methodological reflections on studying food and memory
We particularly welcome interdisciplinary approaches drawing from food studies, memory studies, cultural history, anthropology, sociology, trauma studies, migration studies, literature, film and media studies, and related fields.
Submission guidelines: Please submit an abstract of 300 words, along with a short biographical note (100 words), to [email protected] and [email protected] by May 31, 2026.
The conference will be held in person at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, with the possibility of limited online participation (to be confirmed).
For further information, please contact:
Gabriele Proglio [email protected]
Claudia Sbuttoni [email protected]