PhD Studentships at the Centre

This doctoral research project invites applicants to propose innovative research on understanding and anticipating the evolution of conflict-related slavery in Africa through the lens of African futures methodologies. The project seeks to examine how diverse futures-thinking practices – whether community-based, institutional, technological or speculative – can improve our ability to understand and respond to this persistent human rights challenge. It aims to contribute to a growing body of research on pluriversal futures, or multiple, co-existing possible futures that encompass diverse ways of being, knowing and relating to the world. 

Within this broad area of inquiry, applicants may propose their own area of focus, primary research questions, conceptual frameworks, methodological approaches and case studies. 

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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.  

Research will cross linguistic barriers to take in archival sources from at least two colonising powers: Britain and at least one of: France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, and/or Denmark.  

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. 

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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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This fully funded PhD studentship, based within the Centre's Research Strand 2 (RS2: Understanding Slavery in War), invites applications from candidates with a strong grounding in war studies, who wish to undertake original historical and archival research on the slavery/war nexus in the period 1791 to 1926. 

The period defined by the studentship is one of extraordinary significance for both the history of slavery and the history of war. It opens with the Haitian Revolution of 1791 (the only enslaved-people's uprising in world history to result in the founding of a sovereign state) and closes with the 1926 League of Nations Slavery Convention, the first international legal instrument to define and prohibit slavery as a universal norm. In between lie more than a century of global conflicts in which slavery was not incidental but constitutive: the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, the wars of imperial expansion in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the First World War, and the post-war conflicts and upheavals that reshaped the international order. Across all of these, enslaved people, enslaved combatants, and coerced labour were central to the conduct, logic, and outcome of war. Yet war studies literature has tended to treat enslavement and enslaved people as peripheral, epiphenomenal, or invisible. 

Working within RS2's focus on historical and archival analysis, the successful candidate will undertake an original, rigorously researched study of the slavery/war nexus in one or more conflicts or theatres during this period, contributing to the Centre's ambition of breaking new ground in understanding how slavery and war have interacted across modern history. The geographical scope is genuinely global: projects may focus on any region or conflict zone, and comparative or transnational approaches are welcome. 

The studentship is deliberately open in terms of case study, to attract the strongest possible candidates and the most exciting research ideas. Possible areas of inquiry include but are not limited to:  

• the role of enslaved labour and enslaved combatants in the wars of the Atlantic world;  

• the use of forced labour in colonial warfare and imperial conquest;  

• the intersection of military conscription, coerced service, and slavery;  

• slavery's role in the logistics, supply chains, and infrastructure of “Long Nineteenth Century" armies;  

• the relationship between military occupation and the entrenchment or disruption of existing slavery systems;  

• the ways in which wartime conditions generated new forms of coerced labour and exploitation.  

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