Job description

COMICS. Children in Comics: An Intercultural History from 1865 until Today

Owing to their visual essence and status as a popular, modern medium, comics–newspaper strips, comics magazines and graphic novels–provide valuable insight into the transformation of collective consciousness. Funded by a five-year ERC Starting Grant, the COMICS project constructs the first intercultural history of children in European comics and traces the changing conceptualizations of child protagonists in popular comics for both children and adults from the mid-19th century to the present. In doing so, it takes key points in European history as well as the history of comics into account.

Bringing together a team of six multilingual researchers, this project uses an interdisciplinary methodology combining comics studies and childhood studies while also incorporating specific insights from cultural studies (history of family life, history of public life, history of the body, affect theory and scholarship on the carnivalesque). This enables the project to analyze the transposition of modern anxieties, conceptualizations of childishness, child-adult power relations, notions of liberty, visualizations of the body, family life, school and public life as well as the presence of affects such as nostalgia and happiness in comics with children.

Please get in touch with Maaheen Ahmed (maaheen.ahmed@ugent.be) for any questions and for a full description of the project’s aims and scopes as well as the specific tasks and foci of the team members.

Profile of the candidate

PhD student 1 will work on British, Italian and/or Spanish comics published in comics magazines and newspapers from the 1890s until 1920s, including Comics Cuts, Big Comic as well as successful Italian and Spanish magazines such as Il Corriere dei Piccoli and TBO. Please note that while competence in all three languages is an asset, competence in only Italian or Spanish, in addition to English, will suffice.

PhD student 2 will work on British and French-language comics magazines from the 1930s until the end of the Second World War, covering magazines such as The Dandy, The Beano, Spirou and Le Journal de Tintin.

In addition to the specific language requirements for each profile, candidates are expected to be highly proficient in English.

Some knowledge of comics studies and experience in researching comics is an advantage.

Both positions are four-year full-time positions starting on 1 October 2018.

How to apply

Please send all documents listed below as a single PDF attachment to Maaheen Ahmed (maaheen.ahmed@ugent.be). Please do not forget to specify which position is being applied for in the subject line (COMICS application PhD1/PhD2).

1. Cover letter (ca. 2500 words) including:

a) an explanation of how the candidate’s profile and interests fit in with one of the two profiles described above

b) a description of the candidate’s research project (specific corpus, methodology, expected results, suitability for the COMICS project)

2. CV and list of publications

3. 2 reference letters

A shortlist will be established by 1 June 2018 and interviews will be held via Skype on 7 June 2018.