Doctoral Candidate In History

We are looking for you Are you fascinated by the legal and social history of the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period? Do you want to be an active player in a truly international and interdisciplinary environment, within a prestigious MSCA Doctoral Network, funded by the European Commission? Do you want to know more about how earlier generations regulated the post-mortal transfer of patrimony, through last wills and related legal mechanisms? Are you interested in the interplay between societal dynamics, “learned law” and testamentary freedom? Are you willing to leave your home country and to start working as a Doctoral Candidate in history at a foreign university? Are you looking forward to getting the chance of a six-months research stay in yet another country, at yet another high-level university, and a three-month internship in a museum? Then, you might be the candidate we are looking for For this position, KU Leuven Kulak in Kortrijk will be your home base. This campus combines the strength of KU Leuven with the proximity of a close-knit academic community and an educational concept that puts the human dimension at the center of its programs. KU Leuven Kulak has a strong interdisciplinary research profile and focuses on both regional and international collaboration. At KU Leuven Kulak, you will have the opportunity to develop innovative ideas and make a real impact in both research and education. At the same time, you will be part of the Research Unit of Medieval History in the department of History at KU Leuven. Next to a research axis on the history of social, gender and political history, the research unit has a strong focus on power dynamics within families and communities in late medieval Europe. The Doctoral Candidate (DC) will be supervised by prof. dr. Chanelle Delameillieure (social history, KU Leuven) and co-supervised by prof. dr. Marek Starý (Law, Charles University). In the course of this fellowship, the DC will work six months in Prague, and three months at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp. This DC will focus on generational dynamics within families in the urban Southern Low Countries. For this research, a variety of judicial sources will be used. The DC will study generational dynamics and age inequality in late medieval Brabant, with a focus on acts of last will or on all sort of arrangements with respect to property and inheritance. Project The MSCA Doctoral Network “TESTAMENT” (Testamentary Practices in the Periphery of the Ius Commune Tradition: Freedom and Oppression (c. )) is funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No.. It groups 5 hiring universities: KU Leuven (Belgium, co-ordinating institution), Jagiellonian University Cracow (Poland), University of Warsaw (Poland), Charles University Prague (Czech Republic), and Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (Germany). The network also comprises several Associated Partners, museums and archives, which will host Doctoral Candidates for internships, allowing them to gain practical experience as well. TESTAMENT, an interdisciplinary consortium of social and legal historians from the universities of Leuven, Kraków, Jena, Prague and Warsaw, will study dynamics of freedom and ‘unfreedom’, of power and oppression, through the lens of testamentary law and practice in Western and Central Europe (c. ), with a particular focus on the regions in the ‘periphery’ of the late medieval and early modern academic tradition. The project members will develop a language to transcend the traditional dichotomy between ‘freedom’ and ‘unfreedom’ and will single out criteria that can be used to situate specific cases on this continuum. On the basis of thorough archival and doctrinal-historical research, the project will single out the family, policy, jurisdictional and jurisprudential dynamics that determined the extent to which people could dispose of their goods post-mortally. To this end, the consortium will train promising junior scholars into professional, critically-minded, communicative, cooperative and digitally competent social and legal historians. The Ph.
D. students will be integrated in a unique international network of scholars from both law and social history. They will be trained in both disciplinary and transferable skills at summer and winter schools, at monthly online seminars, through a secondment at another academic partner abroad and also through meaningful experiences in collaboration with non‑academic actors (especially archives and musea). This project will open new scientific perspectives for research by using digital methods (especially HTR-tools) and will add new unedited material to existing open access databases for further research. Through social media, blogposts, (online) exhibitions, course materials for secondary school teachers, interdisciplinary university seminars and presentations at alumni events, the consortium explicitly aims to introduce new approaches to the past through lesser‑known histo