The Ad Astra Fellow - Assistant Professor in One Health is a unique opportunity to join Ireland's pre-eminent centre for historical teaching and research at the UCD School of History.
As an Ad Astra Fellow, you will collaborate with the School of English, Drama, and Film to develop a transdisciplinary academic field across UCD, focusing on the intersection of animals, humans, microbes, and the environment.
With a focus on Africa or South America, your research initiatives in 'One Health' will address critical areas such as:
* To analyse the interconnected origins of disease circuits across human and animal communities and untangle the implications for contemporary disease outbreaks;
* To deconstruct colonial and postcolonial power relations in contemporary understandings, depictions, and management of diseases, environmental crises, and zoonoses by local, national and international health organisations and bodies, including non-state actors;
* To examine the development of pest and biological controls, in the context of twentieth-century development policies and concerns over food production, safety and security;
* To centre the voices, lifeways, and experiences of colonised and/or indigenous communities, and analyse their responses to medical interventions, such as vaccination and sanitation programmes;
* To make methodological contributions (a) to ongoing discussions about how to uncover new types of non-human environmental data sets (archives), such as herbariums or historic microbe collections, and (b) to debates on to represent non-speaking subjects;
* To demonstrate the centrality of narrative, cultural forms, and discursive systems to the construction, representation and dissemination of knowledge.
This Fellowship includes one funded PhD studentship, an annual research budget of €5000, and a reduced teaching load. The successful candidate will be appointed for five years with the possibility of permanency after a four-year performance review.
Long-term goals include training a new generation of researchers in inter- and trans-disciplinary One Health methodologies, developing undergraduate and graduate taught programmes, forging links with international health organisations, and fostering a cluster of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers.