PhD Scholarship in History: Mapping Southeast Asian Lives in London, 1750-1850

via Northeastern University London: Scholarship opportunity in history open to both UK and international students. Deadline is 12 July 2024.

Mapping Southeast Asian Lives in London, 1750 to 1850: Critical and Creative Responses to the Digital Archive

This PhD project draws on the established methodologies of Northeastern’s Mapping Black London project. It is situated in the discipline of history but has interdisciplinary connections to Black Studies and digital humanities at its core. The successful candidate will use a series of extant datasets to explore the experiences of people from southeast Asia at a transformative moment in the history of London and wider world. They will blend critical, creative and digital archival practices to produce new knowledge about migration from southeastern Asia to London from 1750 to 1850 and, in turn, rethink historical ethno-racial identities in Britain more broadly. This overarching question will be interrogated through two sub-questions:

How can digital archival projects recover the hidden lives of southeast Asian migrant settlers in London between 1750 and 1850, and what gaps and silences remain?
How can critically-informed creative practices rethink the meaning of this settlement and reconceptualize historic ethno-racial identities in British history more broadly?
The successful candidate will use familiar techniques of historical research alongside decolonial responses to colonial archival creation, critical fabulation and narrative approaches to archival erasure, considering cultural geographic explorations of questions centred on the local, national and global.

Source: Fully Funded PhD Scholarship in History: Mapping Southeast Asian Lives in London, 1750-1850