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_________________________________________________________________________ FACULTY OF ORIENTAL STUDIES ORIENTAL INSTITUTE PUSEY LANE OXFORD OX1 2LE www.orinst.ox.ac.uk Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Early Modern Indian Cultures of Job title Knowledge: Persian and Sanskrit in Mughal India Division Humanities Faculty of Oriental Studies, in association with the History Faculty Department and St Antony’s College Location Humanities Centre, Radcliffe Infirmary Building Grade and salary Grade 7: Salary in the range £29,249 - £31,020 p.a. Hours Full time Contract type Fixed-term (two years, externally funded) Reporting to Christopher Minkowski, Boden Professor of Sanskrit Vacancy reference 105007 Additional Deadline for applications: information 12 noon Wednesday 14 November 2012. Introduction The Faculty of Oriental Studies and the Faculty of History in Oxford University seek to appoint a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Early Modern Indian Cultures of Knowledge. The successful applicant will pursue a research project which may be in any area of Indo-Persian or Sanskrit literature and culture in Mughal India, but applications are particularly encouraged from those working on the cultural and intellectual encounter that took place between the Persianate and Sanskritic cosmopolitan cultures of knowledge during the Mughal Period. The position is available immediately, and must be taken up by 1 September 2013 at the latest. The University The University of Oxford is a complex and stimulating organisation, which enjoys an international reputation as a world-class centre of excellence in research and teaching. It employs over 10,000 staff and has a student population of over 21,000. Most staff are directly appointed and managed by one of the University’s 130 departments or other units within a highly devolved operational structure - this includes 5,900 ‘academic- related’ staff (postgraduate research, computing, senior library, and administrative staff) and 2,820 ‘support’ staff (including clerical, library, technical, and manual staff). There are also over 1,600 academic staff (professors, readers, lecturers), whose appointments are in the main overseen by a combination of broader divisional and local faculty board/departmental structures. Academics are generally all also employed by one of the 38 constituent colleges of the University as well as by the central University itself. Our annual income in 20010/11 was £919.6m. Oxford is one of Europe's most innovative and entrepreneurial universities: income from external research contracts exceeds £376m p.a., and more than 70 spin-off companies have been created. For more information please visit www.ox.ac.uk Humanities Division The Humanities Division is one of four academic divisions in the University of Oxford, bringing together the faculties of Classics; English; History; Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics; Medieval and Modern Languages; Music; Oriental Studies; Philosophy; and Theology, as well as the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. The division has responsibility for over 500 members of academic staff, for over 4,000 undergraduates (more than a third of the total undergraduate population of the University), and for about 1600 postgraduate students. The Division offers world-class teaching and research, backed by the superb resources of the University’s libraries and museums. Oxford’s extraordinary resources facilitate research at the very highest level. The Bodleian Library, one of the great libraries of the world, has a continuous history reaching back to the late sixteenth century. Its historical collections are outstanding, and as a legal deposit library it can claim a copy of every new title published in the UK. The Bodleian is now second in size only to the British Library. The Oriental Studies and History Faculties have their own collections as well. Every college has its own library, many of which have important holdings of their own (Regent’s Park College has notable holdings in manuscripts and printed books related to Dissenting history). Such historic resources are linked to cutting-edge agendas in research and teaching, with an increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary study. The Division’s faculties are among the largest in the world, enabling Oxford to offer an education in Arts and Humanities unparalleled in its range of subjects, from music and fine art to ancient and modern languages. For more information please visit: http://www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/ 2 Faculty of Oriental Studies The Faculty of Oriental Studies, located on a number of sites but with its centre in the Oriental Institute in the centre of Oxford, is one of the largest institutions of its kind in Europe. The staff teach and research the ancient and modern languages, literatures, and histories of the Near and Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. The Faculty is not departmentalized, but is divided into three Sub-Faculties, within each of which there are separate subject-groups. The Faculty has active programmes in the study of Persian language, literature and history, and comparable programmes in Sanskrit and Hindi language, literature and history, as well as in early modern Indian social and intellectual history. The faculty has some 180 undergraduate students and 239 postgraduate students (120 taught, 119 research) and over 90 teaching and research staff working across an extremely wide range of subjects. The Faculty of Oriental Studies is committed to the view that its disciplines must be studied on the basis of mastery of the original languages in which they were communicated. The Faculty of Oriental Studies is constantly developing programmes of teaching and research on regions from Japan in the East to Muslim Spain in the West, and from late prehistory to the present day. Approaches and disciplines range widely, including language, literature, history, social sciences, archaeology and art history, among others. The Faculty has an outstanding research record. Oxford emerged from the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise as the pre-eminent national centre for Oriental Studies. In Asian Studies (UoA 49), Oxford submitted 33 academics, more than any other single university and more than one fifth of those submitted nationally in this subject. The research of 18 (55%) of our academics was rated ‘world-leading or internationally excellent’ (4* or 3*). Research Fortnight’s analysis of the results placed Oxford top in Asian Studies, and well ahead of the field in Middle Eastern and African Studies with a ‘power ranking’ more than twice that of its nearest competitor. The Faculty is currently building on its research strengths in preparation for the 2013 Research Excellence Framework exercise. For more information please visit: http://www.orinst.ox.ac.uk/ Faculty of History The History Faculty in Oxford is the largest History Faculty in the United Kingdom, and one of the largest in the world, with expertise in almost all areas of historical study. It has a distinguished international reputation for its scholarship and its teaching of undergraduate and graduate students, and was rated second among UK History departments in the 2008 RAE. It has particular strengths in the History of the British Isles, Continental Europe, the Americas, China, and the Commonwealth. Among the many special areas of interest to Faculty members are: political history, social and cultural history, economic history, religious history, intellectual history, and war studies. Within the History Faculty there is also a Department of the History of Art, and a Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine. In addition to Faculty post-holders, there are large numbers of other scholars involved in historical research and teaching in Oxford’s colleges, museums and libraries. Research in the Faculty is focused around, and facilitated by, eight formal research centres and twenty informal research clusters. Research centres provide focal points for major individual and collaborative research projects, and for the organisation of conferences and 3 workshops, and can call upon administrative support from within the Faculty. The centres with an early modern focus include the Centre for Early Modern British and Irish History [CEMBIH] (see http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/research/clusters/early_modern_britain/index.htm) and the Modern European History Research Centre [MEHRC], which acts as the hub for a wide range of collaborative and individual research activity (see http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/mehrc/index.htm). Research clusters support numerous weekly or fortnightly seminars, which have provided the contexts and stimulus for the preparation and writing of many publications by Faculty members. For historians Oxford’s library facilities are among the best in the world. The centre-piece of the Oxford library system is the Bodleian, a copyright library with more than six million books. In addition there are many subject-specific libraries: the History Faculty Library, the Taylor Institute Library (modern European languages and literature), the Sackler Library (History of Art, Ancient History, and Archaeology), the Wellcome Library (History of Medicine), the Radcliffe Science Library and the Social Science Library. All Colleges also have their own libraries. For more information, please visit the History website at: http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/ Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme The scheme in general The Mellon postdoctoral fellowships are funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of a wider Oxford University initiative which is designed: