Postdoctoral Fellow - Kamara Portal

Description of the position:

The postdoctoral fellow will join the Kamara Portal at a formative stage, contributing to the development of a manuscript-based digital research platform. Kamara’s corpus circulates in multiple manuscript and print forms, raising questions concerning textuality, authorship, historical reasoning, and geographic imagination.

The postdoctoral fellow’s primary responsibility is to contribute to the development of a pilot multilingual digital edition and commentary interface for Kamara’s major historical work. This research combines close philological interpretation with collaborative digital inquiry and sustained attention to the spatial and intellectual frameworks embedded in Sahelian historical writing. The fellow will conduct sustained comparative analysis across manuscript versions; work with Arabic texts and aligned French and English commentary; and collaborate in shaping the structure and scholarly norms of the digital research environment. Participation in regular research meetings and contribution to project publications are integral to the role.

By the end of Year 1, the fellow will have supported the implementation of the pilot multilingual edition that anchors the project’s next phase. Advanced technical expertise is not required at the outset; rather, the fellow should demonstrate a willingness to learn new tools and to think critically about how computational methods and philological inquiry inform one another.

In addition to their primary research responsibilities, the fellow will join a broader intellectual environment within the Chair of Transitions that engages questions of African humanities, methodological innovation, and the changing conditions of knowledge production.

Education

A Ph.D. in Islamic Studies, Area Studies, African History, Religious Studies, Intellectual History, Comparative Literature, or a closely related field.

Requirement

• Reading proficiency in Arabic
• Reading proficiency in French
• Demonstrated strength in close textual and historical analysis
• Interest in or openness to digital humanities methods and collaborative research practices
• Ability to work across manuscript materials and multiple textual witnesses
• Commitment to sustained, research-driven scholarship within an interdisciplinary environment

The following are considered assets:

• Specialization in Islam in West Africa
• Experience with manuscript studies or textual criticism
• Familiarity with Pulaar or other Sahelian languages
• Exposure to digital text analysis, encoding, or corpus comparison tools