POSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATE 2027-2028

Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis; New Brunswick (NJ); On-site; USD 63,000 - 77,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Private office

Administrative support

Job summary

The Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University–New Brunswick invites two external Postdoctoral Associates for a year-long residential fellowship during the 2027-28 academic year. Successful candidates may come from any relevant discipline.

All requirements for the PhD or other terminal degree in the relevant field must be completed by August 1, 2027. A record of publication and scholarly engagement relevant to the seminar’s topic is required.

Qualifications

• PhD or terminal degree must be completed by August 1, 2027.
• Record of publication and scholarly engagement relevant to the seminar’s topic.

Responsibilities

• Attend bi-monthly research seminars.
• Present own work.
• Organize a symposium.
• Fellows normally teach 1 undergraduate course during the fellowship year.

Skills

Publication record

Scholarly engagement

Education

PhD or terminal degree in the relevant field

Job description

Theme for 2027-28: Nostalgia

The Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University-New Brunswick seeks to appoint two external Postdoctoral Associates for a year-long residential fellowship during academic year 2027-28. Successful candidates may come from any relevant discipline. All requirements for the PhD or other terminal degree in the relevant field must be completed by August 1, 2027. A record of publication and scholarly engagement relevant to the seminar’s topic is required. During the academic year, Postdoctoral Associates will attend a bi-monthly research seminar, present their own work, and organize a symposium. CCA Postdoctoral Associates receive a salary of $70,000, health benefits, a private office, and administrative support. Fellows normally teach 1 undergraduate course during their fellowship year. Since the CCA Postdoctoral Associate position is considered a residential appointment, candidates must agree to establish residency within a forty-mile radius of the New Brunswick campus during the 2027-28 academic year.

• health benefits
• a private office
• administrative support

Scholars have understood nostalgia alternately as a pathology (both individual and collective), as an emotion with positive or negative effects, and as a societal phenomenon shaping political and cultural movements. The seventeenth-century Swiss physician who named the condition was trying to account for the psychic and somatic effects of modern warfare; he took his etymological coordinates from Homer, who famously meditates on Odysseus’ “pain” algia over his “journey home” nostos. Even in its origins, then, the term has named a vague affliction, encoded a range of meanings for the idea of “going home,” and summoned a set of powerful ideas about the relations of modernity and antiquity. The concept is no less conflicted today. In many cases, nostalgia has functioned as a powerful tool of collective memory manipulation in the wake of population displacement or the destruction wrought by armed conflict. Meanwhile, in some branches of empirical psychology nostalgia has been reframed as a positive, “future-oriented” emotion correlated with increased optimism, inspiration, and general social efficacy in individuals.

Our seminar aims to approach these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective. Can nostalgia be defined, and how does it function both in the past and in our current cultural moment? How is it evoked in literary, artistic, and cultural representations? Can societal nostalgia be a good thing, since people derive part of their group identity from shared remembrance? What is the relationship between nostalgia and partial, fragmentary, or reconstructed memory? We invite scholars from a range of fields, including but not limited to psychology of memory, social memory, cognitive science, neurology, cultural preservation studies, literature, environmental studies, rhetoric and propaganda studies. Our goal is to develop a broader heuristic framework to identify and critically account for a protean concept with a powerful history and a key role in contemporary society.