Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) invites applications for
2 PhD positions within the ERC project Worlding America: How Play Shaped the United States from New Media to Politics, 1503-2028 (1.0 fte, 4 years)
Supervisors: Sara Polak and Frans-Willem Korsten
The PhD candidates will be working within the ERC Starting Grant research project How Play Shaped the United States from New Media to Politics: Worlding America,1503-2028, funded by the European Research Council for five years (2025-2029), and directed by Sara Polak (University lecturer at Leiden University).

The project
We are looking for an excellent, highly motivated, enterprising and enthusiastic PhD candidate to join the project team. WORLDING AMERICA researches how play has been a key force in the past and present process of creating America as a coherent and hegemonic world, from 1503 to the present. ‘Play’ is an activity linked to change, serious even when frivolous, potentially transgressive even when rule-bound. Play intersects with the process of worlding (bringing a new world into existence) in liminal moments when new media forms develop in conjunction with political developments. WORLDING AMERICA seeks out historical moments of disruptive play, when new visual media were introduced that contributed directly to tangible political change. It examines four paradigmatic cases: Worlding Colonial America through Engravings, 1590-1861; Worlding the Nation through Newspaper Cartoons, 1865-1924; Worlding the Body Politic through Television, 1972-2016; Worlding Colonial Mars through X, 2006-2028. Tracing specific elements of play, including imagination, invitation, participation, and improvisation across cases, WORLDING AMERICA seeks to demonstrate how forms of play have been essential to American worlding in ever evolving mediascapes.

PhD positions
WORLDING AMERICA includes two PhD projects:

PhD1: Worlding the Nation through Newspaper Funnies and Political Cartoons: Playful Nativism in the Penny Press, 1865-1924;

PhD2: Worlding the Body Politic through Television: Playful Conspiracism, Satanic Panics, and the Fight against Abortion, 1972-2022;

PhD1: Worlding the Nation through Newspaper Funnies and Political Cartoons: Playful Nativism in the Penny Press, 1865-1924
This PhD project historicizes and visually analyzes a corpus of cartoons and comics selected from the 1865-1924 archives of major West-coast newspapers that have sparked, or pertain directly and indirectly, to the nativist panics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These bouts of racist anti-immigrant sentiment have led, among other things, to the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the Immigration Act of 1924. This period was formative for US media and politics around immigration from the non-white world. Simultaneously, with the rise of mass media, the U.S. became an imagined community (Anderson) in the course of the 19th and early 20th century.

Newspaper “funnies” were a form of entertainment which crucially contributed to intertwining play and politics in this medium. Political cartoons represented, explained, gave occasion to laugh at and interact with American politics and societal developments. This PhD project focuses on anti-Asian racist newspaper comics (i.e., multi-panel strips) and (political) cartoons (i.e., a single image with or without text or caption) from the largest and most widely disseminated (West-coast) newspapers in the period 1865-1924. How did these cartoons play with, and invite readers to play with, reframe, question, and joke about Asian immigration, and to what extent did they, in doing so, contribute to the imagination and worlding of a new reality? On a secondary level, this PhD project will map politically functional, yet playful engagement through comics and political cartoons in American newspapers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries onto social media and meme culture dynamics as seen in the twenty-first century.

This PhD project will revolve around the collection and analysis of visual sources that playfully engage in politics, in order to find patterns in their relationship to worlding and imagined community. The sources are mostly available in digital format, and may not only be analyzed individually, but also collectively with digital tools to identify thematic and ideological patterns. Candidates are invited to submit a research proposal containing the design of one concrete case study (source, title, research question, historical context, theoretical/methodological reflection, analysis) around this subproject’s research questions. In their proposal, they should outline their suggested approach, main research question, and expected original contribution to the field.

PhD2: Worlding the Body Politic through Television: Playful Conspiracism, Satanic Panics, and the Fight against Abortion, 1972-2022

This PhD project investigates the growing sway of televangelism, Satanic panics, and televised conspiracy play, and the role these phenomena have in worlding the evangelical right in the U.S., eventually forging the overturning of Roe v. Wade (2022). The PhD candidate will collect and visually and rhetorically analyze a selection of televangelist broadcasting and televised news about Satanic panics and anti-abortion activism that are drawn from a corpus of nationally disseminated television broadcasts. The project investigates how play and conspiracism operate in white evangelical televangelism and other prolife television broadcasting forums to create a “pure” White America.

Scholarly attention for the role of play and media in the ‘culture wars’ of the 1970s and 1980s, this has mostly gone to left wing, civil rights, and anti-war playful activism. Worlding activities on the conservative Christian right in America have not usually understood themselves as engaging in play, so this aspect has remained invisible. But the play in these practices, including in televangelism, Satanic panics, and radical anti-abortion activism, has resurfaced through recent developments around QAnon and other playful conspiracy theories in that sector of the US electorate. This PhD aims to develop a refined and incisive focus on the cultural and medial genealogy and power of the religious and white-supremacist right wing in the U.S., two powers that have, from the very beginning of colonization, been present in, and often dominated the narrative. In the second half of the 20th and early decades of the 21st century the Christian (far) right has gained a strong foothold in mass media, from television to (local) radio and other outlets, including social media.

This PhD project focuses on worlding efforts within the television ministry of televangelists such as Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson, as a starting point for tracing the themes and rhetoric of conspiracist televangelism, through to contemporary figures such as Paula White. This PhD project will revolve around the collection and analysis of televisual sources that playfully engage in politics, in order to find patterns in their relationship to worlding. The sources are mostly available in digital format, and may not only be analyzed individually, but also collectively with digital tools to identify thematic and ideological patterns. Candidates are invited to submit a research proposal containing the design of one concrete case study (source, title, research question, historical context, theoretical/methodological reflection, analysis) around this subproject’s research questions. In their proposal, they should outline their suggested approach, main research question, and expected original contribution to the field.

Key responsibilities

• Completion of a PhD thesis within four years (1.0fte) or five years (0.8 fte);
• Participation in meetings of the project research group(s) and events organized by the research group;
• Participation in knowledge utilization activities;
• Presentation of intermediate research results at workshops and conferences;
• Participation in the training programme of the local Leiden Graduate School, the LUCAS Institute and the National Research School in Cultural History (Huizinga);
• Participation in intellectual life of the department and the LUCAS (PhD) community;
• Some teaching in the second and third years of the appointment, subject to progress and demand.

Your profile

• You hold a ResMA/MRes or MA with a specialisation in American Studies, Cultural History, Literary or Media Studies, awarded by time of appointment, with a grade of 8.0 or above on a ten-point scale (distinction or equivalent) for your thesis. If the MA thesis is not yet finished, we invite you to provide contact details for your supervisor in your application letter so we may consult with them on your progress;
• You have the ability to finish the proposed PhD research within the allotted time;
• You have well-developed research skills, including the ability to formulate creative research questions and hypotheses, descriptive and analytical skills, and a clear and persuasive style of writing;
• You have full professional working proficiency in English; fluency in Dutch is appreciated but not required;
• You have affinity with the conceptual ideas current in the interdisciplinary field of play studies, and are willing to engage with these ideas in an interdisciplinary manner;
• You are and independent thinker, and a team player.

International candidates are encouraged to apply but must be willing to relocate to the Netherlands for the duration of the project.

The organisation
The Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University is a unique international centre for the advanced study of languages, cultures, arts, and societies worldwide, in their historical contexts from prehistory to the present. Our faculty is home to more than 6,000 students and 800 staff members. For more information see: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/.

Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) is one of the seven Academic Institutes of the Faculty of Humanities. The institute hosts a range of academic disciplines, clustered around a key research theme: the relationships between the arts and society. Our members study cultural production over the course of two millennia, from classical antiquity to our contemporary world, and teach in programmes ranging from Classics and Book History to Modern Literature, International Studies and Art History. Strengthened by our diversity, LUCAS members are uniquely placed to study the broad concept of the arts, with its rapidly changing ideas, aesthetics, and theories of cultural production. Through research, teaching and outreach, the Institute aims to deepen our understanding, both inside and outside academia, of the cognitive, historical, cultural, creative, and social aspects of human life.
As an academic community, we strive to create an open and welcoming atmosphere, stimulating everyone to get involved and contribute, and connecting scholars from different fields and backgrounds.

Terms and conditions
PhD project, 4 years (1.0 FTE, 38 hrs per week; alternatively, the position can be 0.8 FTE for 5 years), starting date 1 March, 2025. Initially the employee will receive a 14-month contract, with extension for the following 34 months on condition of a positive evaluation. The appointment must lead to the completion of a PhD thesis. Salary range from €2.872,- to €3.670,- gross per month for a fulltime appointment (pay scale for PhDs, in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities).

Leiden University offers an attractive benefits package with additional holiday (8%) and end-of-year bonuses (8.3%), training and career development. Our individual choices model gives you some freedom to assemble your own set of terms and conditions. Candidates from outside the Netherlands may be eligible for a substantial tax break. For more information, see https://www.workingat.leiden.edu/.

Diversity & inclusion
Fostering an inclusive community is a central element of the values and vision of Leiden University. Leiden University is committed to becoming an inclusive community which enables all students and staff to feel valued and respected and to develop their full potential. Diversity in experiences and perspectives enriches our teaching and strengthens our research. High quality teaching and research is inclusive.

Information
Enquiries can be made to the PI of the project, Sara Polak, s.a.polak@hum.leidenuniv.nl. Questions about the procedure can be directed to Jennifer Dijkman (im-lucas@hum.leidenuniv.nl). Information about LUCAS can be found at https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/geesteswetenschappen/centre-for-the-arts-in-society and about Leiden University at https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en.

Applications

Please submit your application via the online recruitment system, via the blue button at the top of this page, latest 8 November 2024, 23:59 CET. Applications received via e-mail will not be taken into consideration. Your application should include:

Research proposal of 1500 words in which you unpack one case study. This does not include the bibliography;
Letter of application in which you formulate your interest in the PhD project and explain why you are an appropriate candidate for the position;

• Your CV, listing education and relevant employment history, and any other academic achievements (conference presentations, publications, organization of events, etc.);
• Names, positions and contact information for two referees (no reference letters); please list these on your CV rather than filling them out separately in the system;
• Copies of relevant course assessments (list of grades; certificates demonstrating language proficiency);
• A copy of your MA degree certificate or, if your MA-thesis is not yet submitted, contact details for your supervisor so we may consult them on your progress.

Please indicate clearly in your cover letter and in your file title whether you are applying for PhD1 or PhD2!

Interviews will take place in the second half of November.

Enquiries from agencies are not appreciated.