2 Phd Positions Within The Erc Project Worlding

Vacancy number

15204

Job type

PhD positions

Hours (in fte)

1,0

External/ internal

External

Location

Leiden

Placed on

15 October 2024

Closing date

8 November 2024 24 more days to apply

2 PhD positions within the ERC project Worlding America: How Play Shaped the United States from New Media to Politics, 1503-2028 (1.0 fte, 4 years)
Supervisors: Sara Polak and Frans-Willem Korsten

**The project**

**PhD positions**
WORLDING AMERICA includes two PhD projects:
**_ PhD1: Worlding the Nation through Newspaper Funnies and Political Cartoons: Playful Nativism in the Penny Press, 1865-1924;_**

**_ PhD2: Worlding the Body Politic through Television: Playful Conspiracism, Satanic Panics, and the Fight against Abortion, 1972-2022;_**

PhD1: Worlding the Nation through Newspaper Funnies and Political Cartoons: Playful Nativism in the Penny Press, 1865-1924
This PhD project historicizes and visually analyzes a corpus of cartoons and comics selected from the 1865-1924 archives of major West-coast newspapers that have sparked, or pertain directly and indirectly, to the nativist panics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These bouts of racist anti-immigrant sentiment have led, among other things, to the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the Immigration Act of 1924. This period was formative for US media and politics around immigration from the non-white world. Simultaneously, with the rise of mass media, the U.S. became an imagined community (Anderson) in the course of the 19th and early 20th century.

Newspaper “funnies” were a form of entertainment which crucially contributed to intertwining play and politics in this medium. Political cartoons represented, explained, gave occasion to laugh at and interact with American politics and societal developments. This PhD project focuses on anti-Asian racist newspaper comics (i.e., multi-panel strips) and (political) cartoons (i.e., a single image with or without text or caption) from the largest and most widely disseminated (West-coast) newspapers in the period 1865-1924. How did these cartoons play with, and invite readers to play with, reframe, question, and joke about Asian immigration, and to what extent did they, in doing so, contribute to the imagination and worlding of a new reality? On a secondary level, this PhD project will map politically functional, yet playful engagement through comics and political cartoons in American newspapers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries onto social media and meme culture dynamics as seen in the twenty-first century.

PhD2: Worlding the Body Politic through Television: Playful Conspiracism, Satanic Panics, and the Fight against Abortion, 1972-2022

Scholarly attention for the role of play and media in the ‘culture wars’ of the 1970s and 1980s, this has mostly gone to left wing, civil rights, and anti-war playful activism. Worlding activities on the conservative Christian right in America have not usually understood themselves as engaging in play, so this aspect has remained invisible. But the play in these practices, including in televangelism, Satanic panics, and radical anti-abortion activism, has resurfaced through recent developments around QAnon and other playful conspiracy theories in that sector of the US electorate. This PhD aims to develop a refined and incisive focus on the cultural and medial genealogy and power of the religious and white-supremacist right wing in the U.S., two powers that have, from the very beginning of colonization, been present in, and often dominated the narrative. In the second half of the 20th and early decades of the 21st century the Christian (far) right has gained a strong foothold in mass media, from television to (local) radio and other outlets, including social media.

**Key responsibilities**
- Completion of a PhD thesis within four years (1.0fte) or five years (0.8 fte);
- Participation in meetings of the project research group(s) and events organized by the research group;
- Participation in knowledge utilization activities;
- Presentation of intermediate research results at workshops and conferences;
- Participation in the training programme of the local Leiden Graduate School, the LUCAS Institute and the National Research School in Cultural History (Huizinga);
- Participation in intellectual life of the department and the LUCAS (PhD) community;

**Your profile**
- You have the ability to finish the proposed PhD research within the allotted time;
- You have well-developed research skills, including the ability to formulate creative research questions and hypotheses, descriptive and analytical skills, and a clear and persuasive style of writing;
- You have full professional working proficiency in English; fluency in Dutch is appreciated but not required;
- You have affinity with the conceptual ideas current in the interdisciplinary field of play studies, and are willing to engage with these ideas in an interdisciplinary manner;
- You are and independent think