Job ID: NHTM/POSTDOC

Thinking Through the Museum: A Partnership Approach to Curating Difficult Knowledge in Public (TTTM) is an international, interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral research network integrating scholars, museum professionals, and community members with partner organizations in Canada, the Netherlands, Poland, and South Africa, countries grappling with difficult legacies. Our goal is to explore how Indigenous resurgence, intersectionality, and new theories of memory, materiality, and emotion can better illuminate the entangled legacies of mass violence and reinvigorate the field of museology with new ideas and tools. Thirty years after the call for new, critical museology (Pearce 1989; Vergo 1989), and in a moment of global urgency regarding injustice, what progress has been made? What mechanisms exist to transcend institutional blinders and share tools across the academy-museum-community divide? Can new social theory improve on first wave change, whose approach to 'inclusion' added new voices but maintained identity silos and Western humanist ideas of personhood?

Our practice-based methodology fosters sustained dialogue, inquiry, and creation to bridge academy-museum-community divides in novel ways. The partnership's objective is to transform how academics and community representatives engage with museums in order to help societies heal from colonialism, genocide, violence and oppression. To resist dangerous trends of social polarization, and in response to Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, #MeToo, and the refugee and climate crises, museums world-wide must decolonize, democratize, and apply their unique tools to lead crucial public dialogues on culture, society, history, and humanity. 

TTTM is advertising for a postdoctoral researcher (2 years, full time) to join the National Heritage & Traumatic Memory (NHTM) research cluster. NHTM explores how arts-based practices can help circumvent institutional constraints and engage communities via non-traditional sites and performative modes of display and participation. Working primarily in Poland, NHTM considers how histories of colonialism, the Holocaust, and communism meet, and develops forms of reflection, redress, and repair to address this geographical region’s violently-lost historical diversity. NHTM develops context-sensitive concepts and tools to expand critical museology’s Western-centrism, and collaborates across clusters to develop minority artist residencies, a comparative genocide workshop with the National Museum of the American Indian and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and other resources to engage Poland’s marginalized Jewish, Roma, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, African-diaspora, LGBTQ+ and refugee communities under an increasingly authoritarian government. We are particularly interested in candidates whose research is comparative and transnational (e.g. a comparative study of Holocaust and Settler Colonial genocide memory). We are willing to consider any research proposal that addresses the working group’s wider remit. 

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

(Full-time, 40 h per week)

September 2024-August 2026  

Your tasks: 

• Conduct ethnographic and archival research in your designated area of research 

• Publish articles in international journals and/or book chapters for volumes edited by the project team 

• Present research findings at selected academic conferences 

• Contribute to the planning and organization of project conferences and events 

• Contribute to the overall development of TTTM and its public outreach programmes

• Actively participate in the NHTM cluster, including attending its bi-monthly Zoom meetings

Your profile: 

• Completed PhD in relevant field 

• Demonstrated academic excellence and a commitment to scholarly research and / or relevant professional experience and critical engagement in the arts

• Excellent proficiency in English as well as language(s) relevant to your research 

• Interest in collaborative research, creativity in both team environments and independent work 

Our offer: 

• The opportunity to produce an excellent publication record, and to join a network of like-minded academics, curators, and activists 

• Period of appointment: 2-years

• The postdoctoral researcher will be formally affiliated with Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, but may practically be based in either Montreal or Kraków/Warsaw, though needs to be willing to work in both Canada and Poland (for at least 6 months) during the fellowship tenure.

• Option to work closely with Polish organizations FestivALT, Polin Museum, Teatr Powszechny, or Zapomniane Foundation

• Co-supervision by Prof. Erica Lehrer (Concordia University) and either Prof. Roma Sendyka (Jagiellonian University) or Prof. Joanna Wawrzyniak (University of Warsaw)

• An annual gross salary of CAD $50,000 per annum

Application requirements include a cover letter describing the candidates’ academic experience and qualifications, as well as their plans for research relating to NHTM’s aims and scope (including a plan for time spent in Canada and Poland), curriculum vitae, one writing sample in English, and three confidential letters of recommendation. Application materials can be submitted electronically in a single PDF file by email to capsl@concordia.ca no later than November 1st, 2023, referencing Job ID: NHTM/POSTDOC. Letters of recommendation can also be submitted under separate cover to this address. Selected candidates will be contacted for ZOOM Interviews in early December 2023.