The PhD student will be affiliated to the research project Eco-emotions: Affective Response to Environmental Change in and through Literature. The project is one of four strategic initiatives funded by the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, 2024‒2028.
The main aim of the project is to discuss how humans affectively deal with environmental change, as represented in and through literature, from the past and today, in the North and globally. The current environmental crisis has made us aware of the pressing need for new insight, pertaining to the deeper emotive structures of humanity and the cognitive mechanisms that condition our relationship to the environment. The two main research questions of the project are: (1) How does literature represent and describe affective responses to environmental change? (2) What effect does literature have on our emotions and thoughts, and how can it contribute to sustainability in times of environmental transformations? By discussing these research questions, the project will harvest the yet unexploited potential of powerful, large-scale narratives from the past and today, which have the potential to activate new ways of thinking about and relating to our environment.
The doctoral candidate will be part of the project’s core team and will contribute to its main objectives together with the team. The candidate will be responsible for addressing the project’s research questions from a historical, and more specifically medieval perspective, and will be expected to develop a project based on Old Norse, Celtic, or Latin sources. Comparative, cross-cultural, or diachronic projects will be prioritized. The PhD student will be supervised by one or two of the project members, depending on the applicants’ interests and sources, and will be affiliated to the department of the main supervisor.
The candidate should apply with their own project proposal, but the proposed research project must correspond with the overall framework of Eco-Emotions.