Student assistant Travel Journals

The IISH is preparing to make a unique series of circa 3.500 travel journals travelogues (travelogues) and colonial maps that are part of the KNAW collection more widely available. It is the aim to inventory, describe, and later partly digitize and enrich these travel journals and potentially maps.

What will be your tasks?
As student assistant you will take care of the inventorisation and preparation needed for this project by:

• Creating and completing a detailed inventory (with descriptions) of the manuscripts of the collection;
• Identifying what parts of the collection are unique (esp. manuscripts, potentially also maps), and what parts are also available in other library and archival institutions (in similar or different prints) and whether such other versions are digitally available (including what quality and technical format the digital versions have);
• Advising on prioritization for digitization and possibilities for digital enrichments that serve historical research and wider audiences.

You will be supervised and work as part of our combined projects research team that explores the history of slavery, slave trade and colonialism. You will actively gather input, advice and relevant (processing) guidelines from colleagues of the Collection department.

PhD Researcher Global-Micro History Slavery Asia

The project Voices of Resistance: A Global Micro-Historical Approach to Enslavement across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean investigates histories of enslavement, slavery and racialization through the use of testimonies and personal accounts from court records and other primary source material from across the early modern European colonial empires in the Indonesian archipelago, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The PhD project is open to a researcher that will study one of the following additional archives and case studies: the Catholic religious orders, the Danish and/or other Scandinavian merchants and companies, or relevant local archives in vernacular languages of societies across the Indian Ocean, East Asia and the Indonesian Archipelago. The project focusses on archives and sources that bring ‘everyday’ perspectives into the history writing of slavery, enslavement and racialization. The focus of the empirical part project is on the period from the sixteenth to eighteenth century, and on contributing case studies from outside the Atlantic as a way to balance and renew historiography.

What you will do
You will be employed as a PhD researcher within the collaborative research project. Under close supervision of the project leaders, you will work independently on your PhD research. As part of your employment, you will also collaborate and engage with the team on collective aspects of the research project, such as creating data sets (on slave trade, enslavement and stereotypes), organising meetings and contributing to the outreach of the project through public stories.

You will be part of a combined research team engaged with the global and local histories of slavery. You will be employed and based at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and also in the Economic, Social and Demographic History (ESDH) Department at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, and you will participate in activities at both institutes.

Team Concern-infrastructure Developer - HuC

Are you the Developer who is able to jump into existing applications and make sense of it? Are you able to transform and/or improve those applications? Do you find it a challenge to work within a team and working together with other teams of the KNAW to find solutions to complex issues? Is ensuring security and stability within the infrastructure self-evident to you? Then we are looking for you.

Job description

• We are looking to strengthen our dev/ops team. We design and build or use open-source software and share information about our digital infrastructure. The goal is to be and stay flexible with the infrastructure without losing sight for the long term.
• We are saving and serve a lot of (heritage) data for the public domain and our academic colleagues within the humanities and social sciences to address new research questions using innovative new technical methods.
• You will be working on a broad spectrum of applications for the short and long term.
• You will improve existing HuC software that supports the overview of our landscape of applications.
• Also, you will be working on migrating legacy applications to an application which meets the standards of today.
• If needed, you will support other expertise-teams within the department.

Team Concern-infrastructure Senior Dev-Ops engineer - HuC

Are you the Dev/Ops engineer who is passionate about managing, developing and optimizing applications and infrastructure within a research and data management environment? Do you find it a challenge to work within a team and working together with other teams of the KNAW to find solutions to complex issues? Is ensuring security and stability within the infrastructure self-evident to you? Then we are looking for you.

Job description

• We are looking to strengthen our dev/ops team. We design and build or use open-source software and share information about our digital infrastructure. The goal is to be and stay flexible with the infrastructure without losing sight for the long term. We are saving and serve a lot of (heritage) data for the public domain and our academic colleagues within the humanities and social sciences to address new research questions using innovative new technical methods.
• You will be working on a broad spectrum of applications and infrastructure for the short and long term. You will support other expertise-teams in optimizing their applications for use in our infrastructure and/or optimize/renew the infrastructure to facilitate new requirements.
• You will be flexible to adopt other techniques and programming languages or able to migrate older applications to a solution which can be maintained and supported.

PhD Climet: Microbial methane cycling in arctic lakes - NIOO-KNAW - Wageningen

What will you be doing?

You will be working on the CLIMET project (Climate feedbacks and methane cycling in Arctic lakes: enzymes to atmosphere).

The recent increase in atmospheric methane is attributed to an imbalance between microbial production and degradation. Methane emissions from warming Arctic lakes are an important climatic feedback loop, potentially contributing to this imbalance. Alongside warming, the input of organic carbon as well as the input of glacial dust, containing elements (among which rare earth metals), affects methane cycling in arctic lakes. The CLIMET project team will map the impact of organic carbon and lanthanide-containing glacial dust on the Arctic methane cycle from the genes involved to the impact on methane emission from Greenland's lakes.

You will be executing laboratory experiments which will be carried out in close cooperation with a post-doc to be recruited. In laboratory settings, you will investigate lake-derived methane cycling microbial communities under influence of DOM/glacial dust combinations and its effects on methane emission. Biotic interactions with other microbes, phyto- and zooplankton will be a major focal point as is the link between methane and nitrogen cycling under anoxic conditions. The successful execution of these experiments will entail a combination of classical microbiological (cultivation, microscopy), chemical analytical (GC, GC-MS, GC-IRMS, GC-TOF-MS, ICP), molecular biological (QPCR, metagenomics, transcriptomics) as well as stable isotopic cell-labelling techniques (NanoSIMS, GC-IRMS-PLFA), flowcytometry). The experiments carried will be interlinked with the partners at Radboud University and Utrecht University, which also offers opportunities to participate in field work in Greenland.

What will you be contributing?

• Executing lab experiments assessing methane cycling in Arctic freshwaters.
• Work closely together with the NIOO Post-doc on assessing effect of DOM and glacial dust on biotic interactions affecting methane cycling in various laboratory settings.
• Develop a flow-through column-based lab system to study effects of biotic interactions on methane emission is influenced by glacial dust-DOM combinations.
• Closely collaborate with other ClIMET team members.
• Publish results in scientific journals.
• Contribute to maintaining a friendly, welcoming and collaborative environment within the group.