IAS - Postdoctoral Position in African Digital Humanities (Manuscript and Philological Studies)

Entity: Chair of Transitions, Institute of Advanced Studies  

About UM6P:

Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) is an internationally oriented institution of higher learning, that is committed to an educational system based on the highest standards of teaching and research in fields related to the sustainable economic development of Morocco and Africa. UM6P is an institution oriented towards applied research and innovation. On a specific focus on Africa, UM6P aims to position these fields as the forefront and become a university of international standing.

More than just a traditional academic institution, UM6P is a platform for experimentation and a pool of opportunities, for students, professors and staff. It offers a high-quality living and study environment thanks to its state-of-the-art infrastructure. With an innovative approach, UM6P places research and innovation at the heart of its educational project as a driving force of a business model.

About Entity (Hiring entity):

The Chair of Transitions at the Institute of Advanced Studies develops interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research on the major transformations reshaping contemporary societies, with particular attention to the ways social, technological, and epistemic shifts reconfigure identities, institutions, and forms of knowledge production. It supports experimental research infrastructures that respond to these transitions across disciplinary and methodological boundaries.

Within this framework, the Chair hosts the “Kamara Portal: A Digital Philology of the Greater Western Sahel,” a research infrastructure project centered on the works of Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945), a major Muslim intellectual of West Africa. The project examines Islamic intellectual production in the Greater Western Sahel as a site of religious, spatial, and epistemological transition, while simultaneously developing digital humanities methods that renew and recalibrate philological practice in light of contemporary technological and epistemic transformations. In doing so, it contributes to the Chair’s broader engagement with digital transformation, epistemic change, and the reconfiguration of intellectual heritage in and beyond Africa, while aligning with ongoing initiatives related to digital infrastructures, experimental publication platforms, and new research methodologies.

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