The Faculty of Humanities at Umeå University just advertised four 2-year postdoctoral positions within the faculty’s strong research areas. I work for one of these areas - Umeå Studies in Science, Technology, and Environment - and would like to encourage potential candidates with a background in history of science, technology, and/or environment to apply for these positions.

The job advertisement is unfortunately only available in Swedish at the moment, which is somewhat unfortunate and does not really reflect the strong international character of many of the strong research areas at the faculty. I have provided a rough translation of the essentials below – I’m sure an official translation will follow in not too long. Let me repeat: this isnot in any way an official translation, so please refer to the university’s website for this.

• The Faculty of Humanities are hiring four postdocs as part of a strategic development program for the humanities.
• To qualify, you need to have defended your PhD no more than three years before the deadline and not have been a postdoc or “forskerassistent” (a Swedish academic position) before.
• Your application need to include a complete CV, a list of publications, and a 5-8 page research plan.
• For official information about the history of science, technology, and environment position, contact my colleague Jenny Eklöf, jenny.eklof@idehist.umu.se, tel +46 (0)90-786 54 56 (see the official announcement if you are interested in any of the other strong research areas – you need to indicate in the application which of the six areas you apply for).

Umeå Studies in Science, Technology, and Environment is a dynamic and internationally oriented research group that is very interested in recruiting more postdocs. The core group includes six tenured or tenure-track faculty members and several postdocs and PhD students. We run several large research projects with external funding and are actively seeking new and interesting research partners and projects. We also have a bi-weekly research seminar and guest lecture series. Feel free to contact me or any of my colleagues to discuss potential ideas!

The university has a very good digital humanities lab (HUMlab) with which we have a very good relationship, and I would be particularly excited to see someone combine digital humanities and history of science, technology, and environment for a postdoctoral project.

I can also point out that Umeå is not a bad place to be a postdoc – in 2010, Umeå University was ranked the 4th best workplace outside the US for postdocs by The Scientist. This was for the life sciences, though many of the same reasons apply for the humanities as well.

The original announcement text can be found here: http://www8.umu.se/umu/aktuellt/arkiv/lediga_tjanster/315-127-11.html