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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/
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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
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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:
to provide an intensive and supported career development opportunity for outstanding academics at an early stage of their career;
to recruit the very best of the next generation of potential academics;
to promote equality of opportunity by helping to create a more diverse pool of potential candidates for future academic posts at Oxford.
The University will especially welcome applications from women and ethnic minorities, who are under-represented among its academic staff (section 38 of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and section 48 of the Race Relations Act 1976 apply). The Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships are designed to give their holders supported experience in a broad range of academic duties.
The scheme aims to find some of the ablest and most promising academics, at the stage at which they have completed their doctorates and are starting out on a second research theme, and to equip them for an academic career. We expect the scheme to produce a group of talented academics equipped with the necessary teaching and research skills and experience to be prime candidates for appointment to tenured, or tenure-track, posts at top universities.
Professional and career development
Each Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow will have an academic mentor who will discuss work-in- progress and support the individual in making effective use of the scheme to plan for an academic career.
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Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows are offered a carefully tailored package of professional development. Soon after taking up their appointment, individuals will have the opportunity to meet with a professional development adviser from the University’s Oxford Learning Institute. The Learning Institute has a well-developed programme of courses for academic and research staff and fellows will have access to these. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows are eligible to take the Diploma in Learning and Teaching in HE subject to an application once in post (see http://www.learning.ox.ac.uk/).
The Humanities Division has a full-time training officer who coordinates a range of training opportunities, including teaching-training and events designed to enhance academic and transferable skills. More information is available at http://www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/training_and_support. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows will also have access to career development advice via the University Careers Service, including one-to-one sessions with a careers adviser specialising in the career needs of academic and research staff, career planning and interview skills workshops, and access to information resources.
Each Fellow will be entitled to research support funds, up to £4,000 a year, to facilitate their research development. The uses to which this can be put will be intentionally open, but could include visits to overseas libraries, or attendance at international conferences.
The postholder will have access to a shared office in space that expected to be in the new Humanities Centre, Radcliffe Infirmary Building. The Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Early Modern Indian Cultures of Knowledge: Persian and Sanskrit in Mughal India
The Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Early Modern Indian Cultures of Knowledge will:
take up appointment as soon as possible, and at the latest by 1 September 2013;
receive a salary in the range (as at 1 August 2012) of £29,249 - £31,020 (University Grade 7);
be able to develop expertise in both research and teaching;
have an academic mentor as well as a personalised career and professional development package, including the opportunity to undertake the University’s postgraduate diploma in learning and teaching; and
have an association with St Antony’s College.
The successful applicant will pursue a research project in Early Modern Indian Cultures of Knowledge: Persian and Sanskrit in Mughal India under the mentorship of either Christopher Minkowski or Edmund Herzig in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, depending on the specialization fo the successful applicant. The proposed research project 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.
Applications from women and ethnic minorities, who are under-represented in academic posts at Oxford, are particularly welcome.
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Early Modern South Asia in the University of Oxford The Oriental Studies and History Faculties in Oxford collaborate to create a research environment for the study of Early Modern South Asia. The Oxford Early Modern South Asia Project unites expertise in a range of languages and disciplines. Christopher Minkowski, Boden Professor of Sanskrit, works on early modern Brahminical culture, and has written about the history of Brahmins in the Mughal court, the Sanskritic reception of Islamic sciences, and the early modern transformation of the Sanskrit knowledge systems. The Masoumeh and Fereydoon Soudavar Professor of Persian Studies, Edmund Herzig, works on Safavid history, with a special interest in commercial and cultural exchange among merchant communities in Iran and South Asia. The Professor of Indian History and Culture, Rosalind O’Hanlon works on early modern Brahmin households in North India, scribal service elites in the Mughal imperium, and on the social history of Hinduism in the early modern period. The Reader in Indian History, Faisal Devji, works on the history of political thought in India. The successful applicant would also be supported in reseach by other specialists in early modern South Asia: Imre Bangha, University Lecturer in Hindi, and James Benson, University Lecturer in Sanskrit, as well as by the expertise of Andrew Topsfield, Keeper of Eastern Art in the Ashmolean Museum.
For more information see: http://www.orinst.ox.ac.uk/research/oxford_early_modern_south_asia_project.html
Library resources
Oxford has excellent library resources in South and Inner Asian Studies and related subjects, both in the Bodleian Library and in the Indian Institute Library, which is part of the Oxford University Library Services. The Oriental Manuscripts department at the Bodleian possesses one of the finest collections of pre-modern South Asian manuscripts in the world.
Key libraries include:
· The Bodleian Library (a copyright library with some 6 million books); · The Oriental Institute Library; · The Indian Institute Library; · The Sackler Library (Eastern Art, Ancient History and Classical Archaeology); · The Theology Faculty Library.
The range of central University provision is supported by college libraries. The OLIS cataloguing system incorporates the holdings of all major and most college libraries.
The University and colleges also house a number of world-class museum collections supported by expert curators, notably the Ashmolean Museum and the Museum for the History of Science, and the Christ Church Picture Gallery (see below, expertise in museums).
Oxford also has outstanding resources for the study of Chinese, its literature, history, and culture; the Department of Oriental Books in the Bodleian has a large collection of Chinese books, and the Department of Eastern Art in the Ashmolean has an important collection of Chinese art.
Please visit our websites for more information: Faculty of Oriental Studies: http://www.orinst.ox.ac.uk/ Faculty of History: http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/ Bodleian Library: http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley
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St Antony’s College The Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow will be offered a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellowship at St Antony’s College for the duration of the appointment.
St Antony's is one of the colleges of the University of Oxford which only admit graduate students. It is the most international of the University’s colleges both in the composition of its student body and in its concentration on international studies, covering the international relations, economics, politics, sociology, modern history and anthropology of the main regions of the world. The College has seven area studies centres which work, respectively, on Africa, Europe, Russia and Eurasia, the Middle East, Japan, the rest of Asia, and Latin America. For more details, visit the College website: www.sant.ox.ac.uk
College benefits
As a Junior Research Fellow of St. Antony’s College, the post-holder would be entitled to the following: use of the social and academic facilities of the College; full dining rights at the College at both High Table and common table (at the JRF’s own expense); an invitation to the termly Senior Members’ Dinner (at no charge to the JRF); the opportunity to participate in College events and seminars.
Job description Overview
A two-year research and teaching appointment in Early Modern Indian Cultures of Knowledge: Persian and Sanskrit in Mughal India by September 2013 for an outstanding academic at an early stage of his or her career.
Responsibilities/duties
1. To pursue a research project in Early Modern Indian Cultures of Knowledge;
2. to produce significant publication(s) in a field that is not a derivative of the Fellow’s doctoral work; and
3. to teach for an average of 2-3 hours per week (with a maximum of 6 hours per week) across the two years of the fellowship.
In more detail the teaching will depend on the specialization of the successful applicant. For those with expertise in Indo-Persian, there is text class in Mughal period Persian, available as an option to B.A. students in the Arabic, Turkish, and Persian Final Honours Courses. Teaching for this would involve reading Persian texts in a small class setting for an hour per week for a term, and offering a number of tutorials. The successful applicant could also contribute to the teaching of Indo-Persian in the MPhil and MSt courses in Modern South Asian Studies, as well as give a lecture series on Mughal history. There would also be the possibility of reading texts in Sanskrit or in the older varieties of Hindi with graduate students, for those with expertise in those languages.
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Selection criteria
To be eligible for the Mellon Fellowship scheme, candidates will:
1. at the time of taking up the appointment, hold a masters degree and either have completed a PhD or for candidates in national education systems where the PhD does not apply, be a candidate for the appropriate doctoral examination;
2. be at an early stage of an academic career, and if holding a doctorate have completed it not longer than in the previous four years from 1 October 2013 (excluding justified career breaks);
3. be aspiring to a substantive academic appointment and have career development needs which could reasonably be met by the scheme; and
4. normally have at least one peer-reviewed publication either published or in press.
5. Must be working on, or proposing to work on, a new line of research that is not derivative of their PhD thesis;
6. be proficient in Indo-Persian literature (essential), and have some proficiency in Sanskrit (desirable);
7. must show outstanding promise in their field;
8. have an informed interest in the full range of academic duties and in progressing to an academic post; and
9. have a commitment to their own professional development.
Candidates who already hold a permanent academic appointment will not be considered.
The proposed research project 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.
Working at the University of Oxford For further information about working at Oxford, please see: http://www.ox.ac.uk/about_the_university/jobs/research/
How to apply If you consider that you meet the selection criteria, click on the Apply Now button on the ‘Job Details’ page and follow the on-screen instructions to register as a user. You will then be required to complete a number of screens with your application details, relating to your skills and experience.
When prompted, please provide details of two referees, at least one of whom should be from outside Oxford University, and indicate whether we can contact them at this stage. You will also be required to upload:
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i. a covering letter explaining how you meet the eligibility and selection criteria for the scheme (see above);
ii. a research proposal, which is not derivative of your doctoral work, outlining the work you would undertake during your appointment as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (no more than two pages);
iii. a curriculum vitae and publications list; and
iv. the names and contact details of two academic referees, at least one of whom should be from outside Oxford University.
Please save all uploaded documents to show your name and the document type.
v. Please also e-mail to [email protected] a sample of your recently published, or soon to be published work, of no more than 30 pages. Please do not upload this document with your application.
Separate application is not required for the college of association.
All applications must be received by 12 noon UK time on Wednesday 14 November 2012.
Information for Priority Candidates
A priority candidate is a University employee who is seeking redeployment owing to the fact that he or she has been advised that they are at risk of redundancy, or on grounds of ill- health/disability. Priority candidates are issued with a redeployment letter by their employing departments and this letter must be attached to any application they submit.
The priority application date for this post is 12 noon UK time on 31 October 2012.
Full details of the priority application process are available at: http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/personnel/end/red/redproc/prioritycandidate
Should you experience any difficulties using the online application system, please email [email protected]
To return to the online application at any stage, please click on the following link www.recruit.ox.ac.uk
Please note that you will be notified of the progress of your application by automatic e-mails from our e-recruitment system. Please check your spam/junk mail regularly to ensure that you receive all e-mails.
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