2 ERC-funded Doctoral Positions, History of Medicine, Berlin
Call for Applications: Two doctoral positions (History of
Medicine, Berlin)
Applications are invited for
2 doctoral positions (65% E13)
to be held for up to five years from 1 October 2012 at
the Institute for the History of Medicine, Charité Berlin, for the research
project “Ways of Writing: How Physicians Know, 1550-1950” funded by the
European Research Council.
Successful applicants will join the ERC research group
comprising Volker Hess, Andrew Mendelsohn, Ruth Schilling, Alexa Geisthövel,
and Annemarie Kinzelbach, to complete a seven-person team by focusing on one of
the following areas:
1. Physici and
Protophysici: Physicians in administration
in early modern northern Italy and / or the Spanish court. Writing practices at the intersections of
state or local government, university or medical corporations, and natural
history. Languages: Latin, Italian
and/or Spanish required.
2. Between
laboratory and typing pool: Writing techniques and the modern hospital,
1850-1950. Role of laboratory and
bedside inscription, office technology, and records management in observation
and understanding of disease(s). Experience in historical research on patient
records preferred. Languages: English required; German preferred.
Berlin offers an exceptionally resource-rich and
stimulating academic and cultural environment for doctoral study. Charité Berlin is the combined medical school
of the Humboldt Universität (HU) and the Freie Universität (FU) Berlin. The Institute and ERC research group have
links with early modern and modern historians and historians of science and
technology at those universities and at the Technische Universität (TU) and the
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Holders of the doctoral positions will have
the option of taking the PhD degree in history (early modern or modern), or
history of science, or history of medicine.
The project will explore the primary medium in which
medical knowledge occurred over five centuries, namely, writing and its
organisation and reorganisation on paper.
Physicians’ many roles meant that they used paper techniques shared
across clinical, natural historical, experimental, pedagogical, forensic,
military, accounting, administrative and other activity. To learn how paper
technology works and how this has shaped knowledge over time, to show how human
beings know and deal with the physical world through the world of paper: the
project aims to contribute to this wider goal through its focus on medicine.
Applicants should have an excellent Master thesis and
research potential in history or history of science and/or medicine as well as
specific knowledge and skills needed to work on one of the research areas
listed above. Teamwork ability, readiness for cooperative research, and
openness to multiple disciplinary approaches are essential. Project members
will communicate in English and German.
Applicants with at least a listening knowledge of German will be at an
advantage.
Preference will be given to equally qualified female
applicants.
Enquiries: Volker Hess volker.hess@charite.de or Andrew
Mendelsohn a.mendelsohn@imperial.ac.uk
To apply, please send full CV, sample of written work, and
two-page proposal (in English or German) for research in one of the areas
listed above by 1 August 2012 to:
Prof. Dr. Volker Hess
electronically volker.hess@charite.de,
or by post Institut für Geschichte der Medizin Charité Universitätsmedizin
Berlin Ziegelstraße 10
10117 Berlin
Please note that invitations to interview will be sent in
the week of August 6. Interviews will be
held on 28 August 2012, with decisions announced shortly thereafter.