Career Development Fellow in Italian Studies

Working at Durham University

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Career Development Fellowships

The University is committed to enabling all our colleagues to achieve their full potential. Durham University's Career Development Fellowships are fixed term positions, which include structured development support for early career academics to deliver outstanding education, innovative research/scholarship, and to engage in citizenship activities. The post-holder will be a full academic member of the Department, working alongside world-class colleagues, with the support of a designated mentor.

Career Development Fellows will benefit from tailored support to strengthen their skills, will be provided with a range of academic opportunities, and will benefit from protected time to foster different aspects of their career. The Career Development Fellowships will enable early career academics to acquire a strong and well-rounded foundation to support future applications for substantive academic roles at Durham or elsewhere (no guarantee can be given that a permanent role at Durham will be available for the CDF to apply for at the end of the Fellowship).

The Institute and the School

Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

The Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies ( IMEMS ) represents one of the largest and most diverse concentrations of medieval and early modern studies worldwide. It is also the academic hub for Durham's UNESCO World Heritage Site. One of Durham's flagship interdisciplinary University Research Institutes, it supports world-leading work on the global past from Late Antiquity to the late eighteenth century and across the disciplinary spectrum. To this end, it hosts research projects, houses an imprint, provides courses in advanced study and skills, and offers a range of public programmes. It sponsors cutting-edge research on the World Heritage Site and promotes public engagement with the World Heritage Site and its partners all over the world.

Inventing Futures

The Institute's new flagship programme of research, Inventing Futures (IFs), emphasizes future-oriented consequences of the Institute's past-oriented study. Each of its constituent research projects addresses a particular global challenge related to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG). It uses the rich array of medieval and early modern resources at Durham - and beyond - to yield new responses to that challenge. Led by senior Durham academics, working with colleagues from other institutions, this new wave of future-oriented research will offer a crucial yet frequently overlooked historical and cultural set of perspectives and tools. It will also provide funded opportunities for PhD students and early career researchers to work alongside academic leaders.

The first three projects in the IFs programme are 'Forging Social Solidarities during Religious Wars' (led by Dr Tom Hamilton, IMEMS and History); 'Daphne and her Sisters: Framing Gendered Violence' (Professor Ita Mac Carthy, IMEMS and Italian Studies, MLAC); and 'Imagining Alternatives: Utopia in the World' (Professor Richard Scholar, IMEMS and French Studies, MLAC).

'Forging Social Solidarities during Religious Wars' asks how far a society can hold together when civil war breaks out because of religious differences. The Dutch Revolt, French Wars of Religion, and Thirty Years War - for example - are known as some of the most violent conflicts in European history. Confessional division pushed social solidarities to the limit. Yet Europe's religious wars also prompted unprecedented experiments in peace-making and gave rise to extraordinary works of literature, philosophy, and political theory. How effectively did people respond to the problem of living with religious difference? And how have their responses been understood and reworked all over the world in societies torn apart by religious and civil strife?

'Daphne and her Sisters: Framing Gendered Violence' asks what portrayals of violence against women in the literature and art of the global early modern past reveal about the cultures that produced them. It examines, too, what our continuing fascination with such portrayals says about our culture and society. Of particular interest will be artistic or literary representations whose profound impact can be traced through imitations, adaptations, translations and other forms of artistic recreation across cultures and time. Where words and images live on in successive iterations, the project will chart varying attitudes to their themes and trace genealogies of cultural response to everyday violence. As it investigates the complex connections between cultural products and the societies that produce them, it develops a model of engagement that deploys such cultural products in the global campaign against the very violence they depict.

'Imagining Alternatives: Utopia in the World' asks how it might be possible to imagine better ways of living together even when so many of us feel a sense of hopelessness about the future. It proposes that policy makers diminish the communities they serve when they impose blueprints to manage access to limited resources. The project explores an alternative approach to problem-solving that harnesses the collective power of the human imagination. Thomas More's Utopia (1516), first published in Latin and then translated into many European languages in the century after its publication, provides a model for this approach. The project places Utopia among other literary, philosophical, and sociopolitical exercises in alternative world-making. It explores the early modern culture of invention that produced lasting achievements, not least Utopia , which continues to be read across the world to this day. It investigates the early material history of Utopia and related texts from the period in their journey across borders of language, culture, race, gender, class, and sociopolitical allegiance.

The School of Modern Languages and Cultures

The School of Modern Languages and Cultures ( MLAC ) is a leading centre of teaching and research in Arabic, Chinese, French , German, Hispanic, Italian , Japanese and Russian Studies. Its community of academics, teachers, and support staff aims to foster a world-class student experience at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Our staff are engaged in research and teaching in language, literature, cultural history, cinema and visual culture, and translation studies. The School and its departments figure regularly in the top five in national league tables. The School is ranked in the top 60 language departments globally in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2024.

The Role

This role is one of three that Durham University's Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies is seeking to fill in association with the Department of History and the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. Three talented researchers and scholars ...