Research Associate

The Department of History at Lancaster University are seeking to appoint a Research Associate in the History of the Spanish American Slave Trade. We are looking for a talented historian to join our AHRC-NEH funded project ‘Towards a Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades: Unlocking the Archives of the South Sea Company’ (https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx?f=1&gn=HND-284968-22). This project brings together an international and interdisciplinary team to research the archives of the South Sea Company, a British company that dragged fifty thousand enslaved people to the Spanish Americas between 1713 and 1739. By digitizing, transcribing, and translating the SSC’s voluminous papers, and then making them freely available online, this project aims to revolutionize how the archives of the Atlantic slave trades are accessed, and transform how cultural institutions display materials related to the traffic.

This is a full-time appointment for a fixed-term of 12 months starting 3rd June 2024 or as soon as possible after that.

You will work with Dr Nicholas Radburn, Professor Daniel Domingues da Silva (Rice University), and partners at the British Library, the Huntington Library, and the William L. Clements Library. You will undertake sustained research on archival materials pertaining to the SSC at the Archivo de Indias in Seville, as well as other primary source materials relating to the SSC’s slave trading activities in other archives. You will then assist the project team in machine transcribing those materials and making them available to the public via a newly constructed online portal hosted at www.slavevoyages.org. You will also help translate Spanish material into English, and visa-versa, and generate interpretative essays, maps, images, and lesson plans that will contexualize the archival material.

You will have a doctorate in history, and expertise in researching Spanish language historical manuscripts, preferably those pertaining to Atlantic slavery. Experience using Handwritten Text Recognition software (such as Transkribus), spreadsheers, Omeka-S or Zotero, and text mining software are desired. You will contribute to publications produced by the project team, present the project’s findings at conferences and workshops, enjoy strong mentorship on future career pathways and funding capture, and get experience working closely with the project’s partners, which includes three international libraries and www.slavevoyages.org. You will also join a vibrant cluster of researchers within Lancaster’s history department who focus on the digital humantities and the Atlantic World.

We particularly encourage applications from Black, Asian and/or Minority Ethnic backgrounds.

Informal enquiries are welcomed and should be made to Dr Nicholas Radburn, e-mail: n.radburn@lancaster.ac.uk.

You can visit the Department of History’s webpage at: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/history/.