PhD Studentships at the Centre

This doctoral project will explore the relationships between military conflict and slavery in the context of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), often characterised as the first global war.

The Seven Years’ War has generally been understood as a top-down military conflict between European powers, played out on a global stage. Displacing this traditional understanding of centre and periphery, this thesis will trace participation in the war from the ground up by individuals, networks, companies and colonial operators across notional imperial divides.

The primary research object is to resituate slavery as both a core constituent and production of military conflict. While slavery has figured in important accounts of the Seven Years War, particularly for the contemporaneous occurrence of important ‘slave revolts’ such as Tacky’s War (1760-61), this thesis will be the first to conceptualise the relationship between slavery and war at the heart of this global conflict.

Within this broad area of inquiry, applicants may propose their own area of focus, primary research questions, conceptual frameworks, methodological approaches and case studies. Projects with a transnational and multilingual focus are encouraged.

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Applicants are invited to propose innovative research exploring any element of the relationship between narratives of slavery broadly defined (including post-enslavement life-writing and the “slave narrative” genre; the legacies of enslavement in fiction and the transatlantic literary traditions; and critical theories of race and racialisation emerging from histories of enslavement and indenture) written in English between the period of 1776 and the mid twentieth century.  

Due to the specialisms of the proposed supervisors, focus on the British Empire and the U.S. is preferred, but modes of transnational engagement and comparativist readings across national and linguistic traditions are highly encouraged. Since the candidate will be situated across two faculties, The Department of English and the Department of War Studies, an interest in questions of how geopolitical conflict, conflict-based diasporic movement, and the conditions of war have affected and shaped narrative traditions would be an advantage.  

The LCRSW is driven by a singular, transformative vision: to learn from the past in order fundamentally to change how the world understands, forecasts, and tackles the enduring problem of slavery in war. How, where and why has slavery in war emerged over time? How has slavery influenced the course, conduct, and consequences of war? How have slavery and war shaped the evolution of legal and normative frameworks throughout history? What are the needs of survivors of slavery in conflict? 

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