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Postdoctoral researcher (f/m/d) at universities
(Salary equivalent to TV-L 13)

Your responsibilities

Cooperation in the research project “Ambiguity and Disambiguation of Belonging – The Regulation of Alienness in the Caribbean during the Revolutionary Era (1780s–1820s)”.

The project explores the role the regulation of migration played in the reconfiguration of political belonging and membership to states during the age of revolutions around 1800. As a result of revolutionary upheavals and violent conflicts, political refugees became a mass phenomenon during the revolutionary era. In response to these migrations, national and colonial governments created legal regulations, often for the first time, to control the mobility of foreign refugees and, more broadly, regulate the status of strangers. First, based on a systematic survey and context-based case studies of these efforts at migration control, the project reconstructs comparatively the reregulation of alienness and questions its significance in reconceptions of political belonging. In this way, it examines the extent to which the border between citizens/subjects and foreigners was redrawn by redefining the position of those who did not belong. Second, the project focuses on the Caribbean, one of the most important laboratories of migration control at the time. Through this geographic focus, it brings into view complex processes of determining belonging based on distinctions of confessional affiliation, race, and gender - and their interplay - and interrogates their repercussions on European colonial metropoles. At the same time, it uses the examples of the Dutch and British Caribbean to examine the extent to which imperial and geostrategic practices of tolerance for ambiguity persisted.

The project is part of the interdisciplinary Research Unit “Ambiguity and Distinction: Historical and Cultural Dynamics,” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and hosted by the University of Duisburg-Essen. The Research Unit sets out to study in comparative fashion how individuals, societies and states have coped with ambiguity in a variety of settings ranging from the late Middle Ages through the twentieth century. For more information, visit the Research Unit’s website at https://www.uni-due.de/forschungsgruppe_2600. The project will also collaborate with the ERC project “Atlantic Exiles” at the University of Duisburg-Essen. For more information about “Atlantic Exiles”, visit https://www.uni-due.de/atlantic-exiles.

Mission and Activities

• to contribute to the accomplishment of an ambitious research project by conducting independent and coordinated research in a team
• to work closely with the project leader, Jan C. Jansen, in the administration of the project and the setup of a comparative survey of alien laws
• to conduct archival research on the project’s case study of Curaçao and the Dutch Caribbean and on a comparative survey of alien legislation in the Caribbean during the revolutionary era
• to contribute to collaboration within the interdisciplinary Research Unit “Ambiguity and Distinction”, with the ERC project “Atlantic Exiles” and external project partners
• to provide guidance for project-associated research assistants
• to write single-authored scholarly texts, present research outputs at academic conferences, and contribute to the organization of research dissemination events