Job Description

Durham University's Department of Archaeology is one of the UK's best Departments of Archaeology with an outstanding reputation for excellence in teaching, research and employability of our students. We are regularly ranked one of the top three Archaeology departments in the UK (e.g. Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2024) and one of the top ten globally (World University QS rankings 2024). Our expertise covers a broad chronological and geographical span, from the Palaeolithic to the present-day, and from South Asia to the Mediterranean, Europe and the British and Irish Isles, including a strong suite of research projects in the Middle East.

The Department of Archaeology at Durham University seeks to appoint a talented researcher and scholar to the role of Postdoctoral Research Associate to work on the research project 'Modelling the Black Death and Social Connectivity in Medieval England', led by Dr Alex Brown and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Utilising the latest computer modelling developed in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, we will simulate the spread of the Black Death in England in order to test hypotheses about the spread of the disease and about the connectedness of medieval society. Using historical and archaeological sources, we will reconstruct the broad characteristics of the late medieval population on the eve of the Black Death, such as their location, age, sex, and occupation. This is the 'static' part of our model. We will then infer their 'dynamic' behavioural patterns, such as where they spent their time and whom they encountered in their daily lives. In order to achieve this, the successful candidate will conduct high-quality research to construct the necessary datasets that will feed into our computer model.

The successful candidate will join an exciting interdisciplinary team of researchers and will work closely with Co-Investigators in Archaeology (Professors Christopher Gerrard and Rebecca Gowland) and in Physics (Professor Frank Krauss and a postdoctoral research associate) and the Principal Investigator in History (Dr Alex Brown) together with a postdoctoral research associate in History. The Archaeology postdoctoral research associate will be responsible for collating much of the underlying archaeological data, including drawing material from secondary literature on a wide range of topics, varying from the settlement patterns and communication networks of medieval England through to the mortality rates experienced during the Black Death. You will collaborate with colleagues in History to establish these key characteristics of medieval society, and with colleagues in Physics to prepare these datasets for our computer simulation.

We welcome applications from those with research interests in the broad field of later medieval archaeology and we are particularly eager to hear from applicants with expertise in working with large datasets and mapping software such as GIS.

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