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START DATE: 1ST SEPTEMBER 2026 (NEGOTIABLE)

DEADLINE: 1ST MAY 2026

The Department of History at the University of Liège invites applications for three fully-funded PhD positions (1.0 FTE). The PhD candidates will become part of the ERC-funded project PROXISENSES – Entangled Histories of the Proximal Senses (1350-1650). A Mediterranean History of (Subjective) Knowledge, led by Prof. Viktoria von Hoffmann. We welcome applications from outstanding candidates who can demonstrate academic excellence at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, and provide evidence of relevant research skills to contribute to the project.

Located in the French-speaking part of Belgium, the University of Liège welcomes nearly 27,000 students of 123 different nationalities in a dynamic, multicultural city less than an hour away from Brussels and Cologne, two hours from Paris, and three hours from London and Amsterdam. ULiège is spread across 4 campuses and boasts over 5,700 staff members, including 3,600 teachers and researchers active in all areas of the humanities and social sciences, science and technology, and health sciences.

As a key player in social change and environmental awareness, ULiège promotes ethical, transdisciplinary, and open science. It contributes to the socio-economic development of its region through numerous partnerships with several institutions, including the university hospital (CHU). Given its international orientation, the University participates in the European University of Post-Industrial Cities (UNIC) initiative and has one of the most extensive collaborative networks in the world.

ULiège offers attractive career prospects in a high-quality working environment where well-being, diversity, and equality of opportunity are promoted. Since 2011, ULiège has been proud to display the European Human resources strategy for researchers (HRS4R) label, which reflects its commitment to open, transparent, and merit-based procedures. In addition, it upholds quality and diversity in line with the recommendations of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA). ULiège encourages its academic staff to travel internationally and welcomes international researchers through its EURAXESS center.

ABOUT THE RESEARCH PROJECT

Principal Investigator (PI): Prof. Viktoria von Hoffmann (Permanent Researcher, Fund for Scientific Research F.R.S.-FNRS / Associate Professor, University of Liège).

Project details: ERC Consolidator Grant PROXISENSES – Entangled Histories of the Proximal Senses (1350-1650). A Mediterranean History of (Subjective) Knowledge – (Project n° 101171391, 2025-2030).

The proximal senses—taste and touch—were linked historically to the body, femininity, and subjectivity. This both fed adverse socio-cultural, religious, and gender stereotypes and allowed the voices of women, subaltern subjects, and Mediterranean people to be dismissed as irrelevant to knowledge-making. It also influenced modern scholarship, which has given undue weight to sight and the observation practices of seventeenth-century Northern European as signals of the advent of modern science.

PROXISENSES challenges this narrative, arguing that other forms, eras, and practitioners of experimental practices also contributed much to the production of knowledge about the natural world. Building on histories of the senses, food, knowledge, and the Mediterranean, it breaks new ground with three key questions, each tied to a research objective (RO).

Practices: What was the epistemic value of the proximal senses before the alleged Scientific Revolution (i.e., 1350–1650)?

People: To what extent did manual workers (e.g., fruit sellers, farmers, fishmongers, miners, winemakers) contribute to a better understanding of plants, minerals, and animals?

Knowledge: What impact did a millennium of crosscultural encounters in the Mediterranean have on the construction of sensory knowledge?

To address these issues, PROXISENSES uses three food subprojects to investigate touch and taste across the Mediterranean. Each food represents a main category used to classify the natural world: salt (minerals), grapes (plants), and fish (animals). Explored through diverse, scattered primary sources using digital and archival methodologies, the subprojects offer both transversal joint food histories and detailed microhistories. By unearthing previously invisible knowledge-makers, PROXISENSES contributes to the urgent need to decolonise histories of science by offering a transformative vision of the genesis of empirical practices that are central to our view of natural sciences today.

SPECIFIC DUTIES AND ACTIVITIES

„ Each PhD candidate will complete a dissertation about one of the three case studies of the project: salt, grapes, or fish. Leading a microhistorical study based on detailed archival research, they will follow one product under a variety of forms, from their production/collection to their transformation,looking across a diversity of sensory practices involving a multiplicity of actors.

The projects also examine the ways in which the data collected was recorded and further codified in printed works. Potential primary sources include documents connected to trade practices (custom books, guild records, trade manuals, trade registers, municipal market regulations, and trial records), as well as codified sources including agricultural treatises, natural historical textbooks, alchemical treatises, medical treatises, travel and health regimens, notebooks and teaching manuals.

„ The dissertation must focus on the geographical area considered for the project PROXISENSES (the Mediterranean, preferably the Italian or Iberian Peninsula, or the Ottoman Empire) during the late medieval and early modern period.

„ The successful candidates will be required to enrol as PhD students at the University of Liège and to fulfil all academic and administrative requirements of the doctoral program in accordance with the regulations of the University and the Graduate School.