Postdoctoral Fellow, African Digital Humanities (Manuscript and Philological Studies)

About the role

The Chair of Transitions at the Institute of Advanced Studies, part of UM6P, hosts the Kamara Portal, a digital philology project on the works of Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864-1945), a major West African Muslim intellectual. The postdoctoral fellow joins the project at a formative stage, helping build a manuscript-based digital research platform. Advanced technical expertise is not required at the start; the fellow should be willing to learn new tools.

Key responsibilities

• Contribute to a pilot multilingual digital edition and commentary interface for Kamara's major historical work
• Combine close philological interpretation with collaborative digital inquiry, paying attention to the spatial and intellectual frameworks of Sahelian historical writing
• Carry out sustained comparative analysis across manuscript versions
• Work with Arabic texts and aligned French and English commentary
• Help shape the structure and scholarly norms of the digital research environment
• Take part in regular research meetings and contribute to project publications

Required profile

• Ph.D. in Islamic Studies, Area Studies, African History, Religious Studies, Intellectual History, Comparative Literature or a closely related field
• Reading proficiency in Arabic and French
• Demonstrated strength in close textual and historical analysis
• Openness to digital humanities methods and collaborative research
• Ability to work across manuscript materials and multiple textual witnesses

Required skills

• Close textual and historical analysis
• Interest in digital humanities methods
• Assets: specialization in Islam in West Africa, experience with manuscript studies or textual criticism, familiarity with Pulaar or other Sahelian languages, exposure to digital text analysis, encoding or corpus comparison tools