Postdoctoral Research Associate in Medieval History

Applications are invited for a two-year Postdoctoral Research Associate in Medieval History at Durham University.

The post is part of a project which examines "Interreligious Communication in and between the Latin-Christian and the Arabic-Islamic Sphere: Macro-theories and Micro-settings". It is funded by the AHRC and the DFG (German Research Foundation) from February 2022 to January 2025 and is directed by Dr Theresa Jäckh (Durham/Tübingen) and Prof Daniel König (Konstanz). Dr Chris Bahl (Durham) acts as Co-I. The project engages with the varieties of interreligious communication. On the macro-historical level, it will collect, juxtapose, and systematize scholarly hypotheses on interreligious communication. On the micro-historical level, four sub-projects – of which this post forms one – will focus on a series of case-studies as a way of critically examining existing models and hypotheses dealing with Jewish-Christian-Muslim communication.

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Medieval History to work with PI Dr Jäckh and Co-I Bahl at Durham University. The post-holder is employed to work on a research project which will be led by another colleague. The expectation is that they will contribute to the advancement of the project through the development of their own research ideas. These ideas should relate to the history of Jewish-Muslim, Jewish-Christian or Jewish-Muslim-Christian relations in the Mediterranean. Researchers with experience of and/or interest in working with medieval legal texts are particularly encouraged to apply. Applicants should submit an outline of their proposed research and identify the corpus of sources which will form the basis for their project. They should also specify which language(s) (e.g. Hebrew, Latin, Arabic) they will use in their research.

Possible topics for projects could include, for example: Jewish communities in Muslim- or Christian-ruled territories; the corpora of surviving legal opinions and how these texts relate to, or provide evidence for, interreligious contact or dialogue; how different legal frameworks were chosen in different contexts; how the living conditions of minority groups differed from those of majority groups; how law functioned as a medium through which religious minority groups communicated, negotiated and arranged their affairs with other parts of society.