The University of Hull Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures is an interdisciplinary research centre exploring humanity’s relationships with water in the green-blue regions of the world, past, present and future.
Funded 4-year PhD studentship to start in September 2024 or January 2025. This is an exciting opportunity for an ambitious, talented and enthusiastic researcher to conduct interdisciplinary research in order to advance thinking within the area of blue-green humanities.
Despite being one of the world’s oldest narratives, stories about Great Floods have yet to receive sustained critical attention. No synthesis has brought together the increasingly precious adaptation and mitigation lessons held within the anthropological, literary and historical intercultural responses to past floods. This PhD sets out to mine their potential lessons for the present. It will set out applied historical lessons of global value resulting from analysis of the Great Flood stories that span the ages through Indigenous South and North America, the Near East, the Greco-Roman world, and Mesoamerica.
This exciting PhD project will address this environmental history research gap via detailed examination centred upon the context-specific elements from flood stories that made the flood mitigation/adaptation options successful (or not) within sources such as the “earth-diver’ motif in the Northeastern United States, the Maya Deluge Myth and the Four Flood Myth Traditions of Classical China.
The student will analyse international historical, ethnographic, and paleoclimatology sources, oral history collections and academic literature on Great Flood stories and conduct semi-structured interviews/policy document analysis on present-day flood resilience in a specific flood-prone region.
They swill be encouraged to produce a policy report, article and a short book publication such as a Cambridge Element (a book series within Treatied Spaces Research Group). The aim of each output will be to connect historical knowledge to present-day practice. The PhD will also have its own suite of impact-orientated activities designed to tie the flood experiences of populations within Yorkshire to the flood experiences of communities across the globe. The selected student will be mentored to bid for further funds from subject associations and from HIKE to advance these.
Full details can be found here.
Application Deadline 24 January 2024
Interviews will take place during the week commencing 19th February 2024
Join our webinar for more information
Our free webinar on Monday 27th November at 6pm gives you the opportunity to meet centre leads and PhD supervisors from the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures and ask your own questions about the programme. Click here to book your place.
If you have any queries about this project, please address them to watercultures@hull.ac.uk
