UNIVERSITY OF TORINO Call for Admission for PhD positions – XXXIV Cycle
4 PhD three-year fellowships in Global History of Empires, an international joint program between the University of Turin and the National Research University – Higher School of Economics (St. Petersburg and Moscow)
The PhD programme Global History of Empires is designed to provide a suitable scientific and professional qualification for research in early modern and modern history, with particular attention to its global dimension. It offers an interdisciplinary degree for students who desire to study global issues such as conflict, migration, human rights, governance, environment, energy, technology, sustainable development and the challenges these issues present for lasting peace, equality and prosperity. The PhD programme is based on the assumption that empires did not belong exclusively to the past, and that they left their imprint on the contemporary world in a variety of ways that we often fail to appreciate. Its aim is to enrich the understanding of the historical origins of the complex mosaic of institutions, practices, habits of thought and organization that make up the modern world.
The consortium will include faculty and research teams that are specifically poised to address the key questions in the study of the global history of empires: the historical dynamics of imperial transformations and post-imperial political and cultural orders, the global entanglements between imperial formations, the role of peripheral, emulative, and rival imperialisms in the global dynamics of empire, and de-colonization in early modern and modern history.
With the help of a broad range of new methodologies for studying empires, such as the connected history or the post-colonial studies, the PhD programme fosters research with a focus on:
- the global dimension, conceived as a way to go beyond national histories and uncover the entanglements between spaces, regions, and rival universalisms;
- the early modern and modern historical dynamics of imperial expansion, decline, transformations and de-colonization;
- the beyond-Europe perspective and a revision of the taxonomy based on the First World and the Third World with the help of perspectives from peripheral and rival universalisms;
- a cross-disciplinary research interacting with the humanities, the social sciences and the history of science and knowledge production.
Thematic focus will include intellectual construction of empires, subjecthood and citizenship in imperial and post-colonial settings, gender, trajectories of transition from empire to post-imperial orders, European studies and the perspective on Europe from outside, history of migrations and diaspora, legal pluralism in comparative perspective.