Postcolonial Studies Initiative

01/06/2026

The PCI Summer Newsletter is available! Read it here: https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?e=[UNIQID]&u=ab50c595db722886e10aad6ac&id=70e68f51c3

14/05/2026

Call for Global Slavery History Fellowships (GSHF) in Amsterdam

Deadline April 1, 2026

A coalition of Amsterdam based Archives, Museums and Historical institutes* with the generous support of the Insinger Foundation has taken the initiative for a five-year programme that offers three three-month long fellowships per year for curators, archivists and historians in the field of slavery history.
The fellowships are open to professionals working on the history of slavery in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian archipelago, linked to the Dutch involvement in slave trade and slave labour.

More info:

The fellowships are open to professionals working on the history of slavery in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian archipelago, linked to the Dutch involvement in slave trade and slave labour.

06/05/2026

PhD position on Images and Justice

University of Copenhagen

Deadline: 27 May

The Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen is inviting applications for one three-year PhD scholarship with expected starting date September 1st, 2026 or shortly thereafter.

The PhD will be part of the ERC Consolidator Grant, Before the Image – The Political Ontology of Images for Legal and Social Justice. The project will investigate how images used to document violence, war crimes and human rights violations are created – not only in the moment when they are taken or viewed, but also in processes of designing image technologies and developing camera and visual literacy skills.

As part of this larger project, the PhD will investigate how visual literacy, including memory, perceptions of truth, and training, impact ways in which images are seen, focusing on how experts and non-experts view images that document violence. It is expected that the PhD candidate will carry out ethnographic fieldwork at open source investigation trainings and do interviews with trainers and participants at these trainings in order to study the processes through which open source investigators are taught to view images for the purposes of verification, geo- and chronolocation etc.

More info:

05/05/2026

Doing Gender Lecture – Zaida Capote Cruz (Havana, 1967) – May 8, 2026

—— new location:
BAK (pauwstraat 13A, Utrecht)

Universes of Cuban Feminism in the 20th Century: Women in Revolution

Time: 17:15 – 19:00 hrs.
Location: Utrecht Janskerkhof 15A, 0.04
Chair: Jamila Mascat

This lecture is jointly organized by the NOG (Netherlands Research School
of Gender Studies) with the IOS Gender, Diversity and Global Justice Platform

What have women done during the Cuban Revolution, and what has the Revolution done for Cuban women? My talk offers a historical overview of Cuban women’s struggle for their rights and the scope of their emancipation throughout the 20th century. Engaging with the work of several Cuban authors in film and literature, it explores key milestones achieved by Cuban feminists since the 1959 Revolution and traces the evolving place of women in Cuban society up to the present day, with all its ongoing uncertainties.

Biography
Zaida Capote Cruz (Havana, 1967) is a senior researcher at the José Antonio Portuondo Valdor Institute of Literature and Linguistics (National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM – location Havana, Cuba), where she coordinates the Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda Chair and leads a project on Cuban feminist journals between 1900 and 1958. She is also a member of the Cuban Academy of Language (Academia Cubana de la Lengua).
Her work focuses on Latin American narrative and essay writing, archival research and critical editions, as well as cultural analysis related to the history of feminism in Cuba and the representation of women.

She has published the books Vindictas. Cuentistas cubanas (2025), El ensayo y la crítica literarios de la diáspora cubana. Índice bibliográfico (2023), Estado crítico (2023), Tribulaciones de España en América. Tres episodios de historia y ficción (2021), Loynacianas (2017), La nación íntima (2007), Contra el silencio. Otra lectura de Dulce María Loynaz (2005), and Tres ensayos ajenos (1994).

Doing Gender Lecture by Dr. Zaida Capote – in English and Spanish

The Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies organises the DOING GENDER Lecture Series in cooperation with her partners. These lectures stress the importance of doing gender work combined with an active involvement in the practice of gender theory and research. The concept of DOING GENDER suppo...

05/05/2026

CFP International Conference:
Food and Memory: Practices, Narratives, and Afterlives of the Past

University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo, Italy
September 17-18, 2026

Keynotes: Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Alessandro Portelli (University of Rome La Sapienza)

Food is one of the most powerful, yet underexplored, sites of memory. Practices such as cooking, eating, and commensality often act as embodied archives of lived experience, cultural knowledge, and intergenerational transmission. From Proust’s madeleine to Benjamin’s reflections on memory, materiality, and everyday life, food has long been recognized as a trigger of recollection. Situated at the intersection of the historical, the cultural, the social, the political, the sensory, and the material, food offers a particularly fruitful lens through which to explore memory and is a privileged space for negotiating identity, loss, displacement, and historical trauma across space and time.
Despite a growing literature on food in relation to identity and mobility, the explicit dialogue between food studies and memory studies remains limited. Anthropological scholarship has shown how meals and ritual food practices embed the past in everyday life and social relations (Sutton 2001). More recent work in the field of oral history has emphasized the multisensorial nature of remembering, showing how memory is evoked through taste, smell, and touch (Proglio 2025). Giuseppe Di Porto’s recollection of hunger in Auschwitz, in dialogue with Alessandro Portelli (2025), explores the loss and recovery of humanity, and offers a reflection on the methods and practices of oral history, on the distinction between “testimony” and “narrative,” and on the processes of memory. Drawing on theories of memory studies, in particular postmemory (Hirsch 1997, 2012), this conference seeks to address this gap by bringing together scholars who critically examine the intersections of food, memory, and the past from a cultural, historical, and social perspective.
We invite contributions that explore how food practices, narratives, and afterlives shape both individual and collective memories, and how they participate in the construction, negotiation, or contestation of histories, especially in contexts marked by historical and cultural trauma. Particular attention is given to postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, to the gendered and embodied dimensions of food memory, and to the processes of adaptation and hybridization through which memories are transformed rather than simply preserved.
Possible themes include, but are not limited, to:
• Food and forms of memory: cultural, social, embodied, sensorial, postmemory, multidirectional, counter-memory, transnational
• Food and memory in contexts of migration, diaspora, and “subcultures”
• Food, historical trauma, and the afterlives of war, genocide, displacement, exile, colonialism, and imperialism
• Food, nostalgia, and constructions of home, tradition, and heritage
• Oral history, food, memorial processes and methodological approaches
• Postcolonial, decolonial, feminist, and intersectional approaches to food and memory
• Gendered food practices, domestic spaces, and the transmission of memory
• Q***r, nonbinary, racial, and racialized identities articulated through food
• Hybridization, adaptation, and culinary pluralism

• Everyday food practices as archives
• Silence, absence, and loss expressed through food
• Food in film, literature, visual media, and oral history
• Methodological reflections on studying food and memory
We particularly welcome interdisciplinary approaches drawing from food studies, memory studies, cultural history, anthropology, sociology, trauma studies, migration studies, literature, film and media studies, and related fields.
Submission guidelines: Please submit an abstract of 300 words, along with a short biographical note (100 words), to [email protected] and [email protected] by May 31, 2026.
The conference will be held in person at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, with the possibility of limited online participation (to be confirmed).
For further information, please contact:
Gabriele Proglio [email protected]
Claudia Sbuttoni [email protected]

20/04/2026

Join us for the next Doing Gender Lecture with Zaida Capote Cruz on the 8th of May entitled "Universes of Cuban Feminism in the 20th Century: Women in Revolution."

14/04/2026

PhD Palimpsests of Trauma and Resilience

Utrecht University
Deadline 16 May

De PhD positie draagt bij aan volgende onderzoeksdoelen: binnen het werkpakket richt deze PhD positie zich onder de titel ‘Palimpsests of Trauma and Resilience: Religious Heritage Sites Through Conflict, Emancipation and Secularization’ op religieuze ‘traumascapes’, specifiek op drie ‘sites’ in Utrecht (de voormalige huiskerk Maria Minor aan Achter Clarenburg), het complex van voormalige huiskerk en huidige kathedraal St. Gertrudis (Willemsplantsoen) en de kerk van St. Jacobus (aan de Bemuurde Weerd). Deze plekken zijn ‘palimpsesten’ van trauma’s en daarom geschikt voor onderzoek naar trauma in relatie tot religieus erfgoed.

Hoe speelt trauma de rol in de omgang met historische religieuze gebouwen? De PhD werpt nieuw licht op trauma in het stedelijke landschap en wie dit bewonen.

14/04/2026

PhD Position: Embodied Knowledge of the Past (Traumascapes)

Radboud University
Deadline 6 May

Are you eager to contribute to research on the colonial traumatic past within a transdisciplinary team? In the Traumascapes project, you will explore how embodied methods such as dance help identify and process historical trauma. Apply now for this PhD position!

This PhD forms part of the NWA ORC project ‘Traumascapes: Valuing, Negotiating and Sharing Sites of Trauma, Pain, and Loss’ (2026–2032), in which transdisciplinary teams of researchers, together with societal partners, memory communities and citizens, are conducting research into landscapes associated with collective traumas from our past. The project is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) under the NWA ORC programme ’Places of Value: Context-Aware Negotiation on the Future of Historically Charged Sites’. The consortium places a strong emphasis on exchange and joint reflection. In this context, you will participate in regular project-wide workshops and meetings.

Do you want to work as a PhD 'Embodied Knowledge of the Past (Traumascapes)' at the Faculty of Arts? Check our vacancy!

28/03/2026

3 PhD Positions in Sociology in the ERC project "Dealing with Distrust." Applications close on the 5th of May. For more information see:

19/03/2026

Postdoc on q***r of colour movement intellectuals in the Netherlands and the UK at Utrecht University! Apply before the 24th of April 2026.

Do you want to delve into the archives of writers, artists, and filmmakers involved in q***r of colour movements in the 1980s and 1990s? Come join our team!