Postdoctoral Research Associate in West African Arts Education

Job id: 0+4666. Salary: £43,205 - £45,521 per annum inclusive of London Weighting Allowance.

Posted: 21 August 2024. Closing date: 22 September 2024.

Business unit: Faculty of Arts Humanities. Department: English Language Literature.

Contact details: Dr Jarad Zimbler. Jarad.zimbler@kcl.ac.uk

Location: Strand Campus. Category: Research.

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About us

King’s College London is one of England’s oldest and most prestigious universities, founded within the tradition of the Church of England by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington who granted our royal charter in 182+.

King's has a proud history of inspiring and supporting those who seek to solve the world's most pressing problems. For almost 200 years, our community has been deeply rooted in the belief that learning and research should serve society.

This commitment to knowledge with purpose – using our expertise as a force for good – lies at the heart of our core mission at King’s. From research that led to the discovery of the structure of DNA, to developing life-changing therapies and making maths education available to underrepresented groups, we continue to have a transformational impact on society.

Fourteen people from King’s and its associated institutions have been awarded the Nobel Prize, including Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu for his role in South Africa’s anti-apartheid campaign, and Professor Michael Levitt for his joint work in developing multiscale models for complex chemical systems.

Notable alumni include British sprinter and world-record holder Dina Asher-Smith, biophysicist Dr Rosalind Franklin, famous for her work in X-ray spectroscopy, and acclaimed children’s writer Sir Michael Morpurgo.

The Faculty of Arts Humanities at King’s is distinctive in representing exceptional strength in both the longer established disciplines (such as Philosophy, Classics, Theology, English, History, Languages, and Music) and world-leading quality in more recently established fields (such as Digital Humanities, Film, Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts, and Culture, Media and Creative Industries).

About the role

King’s College London seeks to appoint a research associate for a period of 36 months (February 2025 to January 2028). We are looking for an outstanding and highly motivated postdoctoral researcher with experience of working on the history and/ or sociology of education in Africa, who would join a team on LITAID, a project funded by a UKRI Frontier Research Guarantee Grant.

LITAID – Decolonization, Appropriation and the Materials of Literature in Africa and its Diaspora – addresses questions about cultural production, arts education and literary materials. It focuses on the role of the arts in decolonization, and looks especially at Ghanaian cultural production, considering its transnational dimensions from the perspective of local artists and institutions as well as a range of visitors from abroad, who came seeking decolonial resources for their own communities.

The research associate will be chiefly responsible for one of the project’s six strands, a study of Ghanaian arts and literary education between 1+46 and 1+62. The purpose of this strand is to ascertain how the Ghanaian state and Ghanaian educators and artists understood the role of the arts and art education during the period of decolonization. The postholder will spend extended periods conducting archival research in Britain and Ghana and undertaking fieldwork-based case studies of particular educational institutions in Ghana.

The postholder, who will work independently but under the supervision of the principal investigator. The postholder will be responsible for identifying, surveying and analyzing relevant archival materials; establishing the relationship between policies and their implementation, both before and after Ghanaian independence; and undertaking case studies of specific primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions, based on fieldwork. The postholder will also contribute to project outputs (conference papers, journal articles and a monograph proposal), participate in regular team-meetings, and will assist in the organization and management of events.

This is a full-time post (35 hours per week), and you will be offered a fixed term contract until 31/01/2028

About you

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

PhD qualified in relevant subject area (or pending results)
Knowledge of relevant approaches to history and/or sociology of education.
Experience of archival research and ability to manage, organize and analyze large volumes of archival material.
Familiarity with one or more of Ghana’s languages.
Ability to use initiative to solve problems arising in the research context.
Ability to organize time, work to meet deadlines, manage competing priorities and complete research outputs.
Ability to work closely with other researchers. Read more