The Hansen Foundation is offering a

doctoral scholarship in (Computational) History / Cultural Anthropology / Ecology / Geography

at the University of Passau as soon as possible.

With your relevant work, we are looking for correlations and possibly interactions between cultural factors on the one hand and landscape factors on the other in the region of the entire Šumava (Bavarian Forest). The area under investigation is not only attractive because of its nature and proximity to Passau, but is also particularly interesting for the research question, as the Šumava is a region that was and is characterized by (historical and current) political borders, but geologically represents a uniform mountain landscape.

The scholarship is embedded in the project “Regional Collectives at the End of the Weimar Republic” of the Passau Chairs of German Linguistics and Computational Humanities. For the first time, we are systematically processing the materials of the Atlas of German Folklore (1930-1935) for Bavaria - the largest humanities research project ever undertaken in Germany. The atlas used questionnaires to document people's everyday culture at the end of the Weimar Republic. For Bavaria alone, there are a total of 450,000 data records for 1,820 places, which are available to you for your doctoral project.

You will enrol as a doctoral student at the University of Passau and be supervised by Professor Dr Malte Rehbein (Computational Humanities), who will serve as your primary advisor. At the same time, you will receive non-personalised support from the Hansen Foundation and its subordinate Research Centre for the Study of Collectives at the University of Regensburg.

The project is embedded in a broader research context that includes collaboration with another scholarship holder, the research initiatives of the Chairs of Computational Humanities and Linguistics, the Computational Historical Ecology research programme, and the Passau Methodikum. It is designed to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and encourage a shift in perspective. Depending on your academic background, you will bring a focus from ecological, historical, cultural studies, or historical-geographical perspectives.

A central aspect of the project is the joint consideration of research subjects as machine-readable data. The dissertation will also contribute to the development of a “Big Data source criticism,” which adapts and extends traditional historical methodology to large-scale datasets.

Requirements include a successfully completed university degree with a focus in history, folklore/empirical cultural anthropology, geography, ecology, digital humanities, or a related field. You should have a strong interest in topics such as environmental, everyday, or social history, cultural or geoanthropology, or historical ecology. As our work is data-driven, you will need relevant skills in the analysis of research data — for example, through quantitative methods, databases, geographic information systems (GIS), or text and data mining. You will be closely integrated into the Passau-based research groups throughout your project and will have the opportunity to acquire and develop any necessary skills there. A good reading proficiency in German is required.

The financial support provided by the foundation amounts to €1,400 per month (tax-free). The foundation permits up to ten hours of secondary employment per week. If the necessary qualifications and funding are in place, this may take the form of work on another research project within the Chair of Computational Humanities. The scholarship is limited to two years. We will actively support the search for follow-up funding to complete the doctorate in good time. Residency in Passau is desirable and beneficial, but not a strict requirement.

Curious? Interested? Then please submit an academic CV including transcripts, along with a motivation letter outlining your interest in the project and in pursuing further academic qualifications (in a single PDF). If your application sparks our curiosity and interest, we will invite you to an interview.

Please send your application directly to malte.rehbein@uni-passau.de by 25 July 2025. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Malte Rehbein directly.

Link: https://che.hypotheses.org/883

----

Dr. phil. Thomas Nikolaus Haider

Computational Humanities and Multilingual Computational Linguistics

University of Passau