PhD student in digital humanities (4 years, 75%)
Publication date:
22 April 2025Workload:
75%- Place of work:Bern
Job summary
Join the Bit Philology project at the University of Bern! This fully funded PhD position, available from September 2025, offers an exciting opportunity in digital humanities.
Tasks
- Work on your dissertation focused on born-digital literary archives.
- Collaborate with a diverse team and engage in project activities.
- Present and publish research findings locally and internationally.
Skills
- Master's degree in digital humanities or related fields, completed by July 2025.
- Experience or interest in born-digital archival records.
- Proficiency in English and French, with strong motivation to work independently.
Is this helpful?
The Bit Philology project at the Digital Humanities unit, University of Bern, is offering a fully funded PhD position in the field of digital humanities. The position is available from September 2025, with a duration of four years, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
The Bit Philology project studies born-digital materials in literary archives, with a focus on Swiss collections in French and Italian. As a significant portion of contemporary literature is created digitally, literary archives increasingly include born-digital documents-posing new challenges for their study. The project seeks to develop methods for cataloguing these archives, create prototypes for scholarly editions, and explore authors' creative processes through digital materials. It also aims to train future researchers and advance practices in textual scholarship and digital humanities.
The PhD project's general objective is to enhance the discoverability of born-digital sources through rich archival descriptions. Specifically, it aims to define a conceptual model for describing born-digital materials in literary archives and apply this model to selected case studies. The PhD thesis will be supervised by Prof. Elena Spadini (PI of the Bit Philology project, University of Bern).
Work on your dissertation and participate in project activities, including
• collaborating with the rest of the team;
• working in archives;
• working with a set of OWL ontologies;
• create RDF datasets;
• publishing and presenting your work locally and internationally;
• contributing to the organisation of scholarly events and to the communication strategy of the project.
Participation in teaching is optional.
Master's degree in digital humanities or library and information science or textual criticism and literary studies. The master should be completed by July 2025 at the latest.
Prior experience or strong interest in
• born-digital archival records;
• Semantic Web technologies;
• data mining and machine-learning.
Strong motivation to work independently as well as with others within a diverse, interdisciplinary environment.
Self-discipline and creative thinking.
Working proficiency in English and French.
Contact person: Elena Spadini (E-Mail schreiben)
If you are eager to work with born-digital literary archives, at the crossroad of digital humanities and textual scholarship, please apply by sending the following documents to E-Mail schreiben:
• Academic CV
• Letter of motivation, explaining how you fit the candidate profile
• One writing sample (e.g. MA thesis or chapter, publication, seminar paper)
• Contact details of two references
Please organise all the documents together into one PDF file and name the file as follows: yourSurname_BitPhil_PhD-A.pdf (e.g. Spadini_BitPhil_PhD-A.pdf).
Application deadline: 31 May 2025.
Interview dates: 23-24 June, 1 and 3 July.
