[Job] Postdoctoral researcher on literary and material cultures of Southeast Asia

Postdoc opportunity at Leiden University looking at Indian puranas in Southeast Asia. Deadline for application is 15 April 2023.

The Faculty of Humanities, Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) is looking for a postdoctoral researcher to focus on the influence of the Purāṇas on the literary and material cultures of Southeast Asia for the ERC Advanced Grant project “PURANA – Mythical Discourse and Religious Agency in the Puranic Ecumene” (grant number 101054849).

Project Description
The Purāṇas constitute the most voluminous and enduring genre of Sanskrit literature. While many important Purāṇas were first recorded and circulated in the first millennium CE, the genre has remained a living tradition through the colonial period until the present day. Despite the tradition’s centrality for cultural production in South Asia, we know very little about their historical embeddedness. PURANA makes a critical intervention in the field by tracing the composition, transmission, translation, and agency of the Purāṇas as a transregional and transhistorical process involving multiple actors, audiences, and geographic contexts. Adopting a longue durée perspective, we argue that the Purāṇas’ mythical discourse underlies and unites the religio-political culture of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis—establishing what we call a ‘Puranic Ecumene’: a vast part of the inhabited premodern world united by a distinctive mythical discourse, a hegemonic vision of the integration of society and cosmos, and a remarkable way of anchoring the present in the continuing ancient past.

Key Responsibilities
The postdoctoral researcher will carry out research on the reception and re-creation of Indic Puranic narratives in Southeast Asian literary and material culture. While the Old Javanese Brahmāṇḍapurāṇa appears to be a unique case of direct translation of a known Sanskrit Purāṇa into Old Javanese, court poetry (Kakawin) in general attests to the massive impact of the Purāṇas on Javanese religion and society. Reception of Puranic narratives is also attested in epigraphic sources, temple arts, and iconographic programmes. The ideal candidate would make use of the large collection of Old Javanese manuscripts and Southeast Asian archival materials in the Leiden University Library special collections and the museums of the Netherlands. In addition to doing research, the candidate will have the opportunity to teach within the LIAS.

Source: Postdoctoral researcher on literary and material cultures of Southeast Asia – Leiden University