PostDoc in History (or related discipline, 80%)

SNSF Consolidator Grant project "The Battle of Materials: Commodity ’Research and Propaganda’ and the Road to Immoderate Consumption, 1900-1980"

The Europainstitut / Institute for European Global Studies (EIB) of the University of Basel, founded in 1993, analyses the relationships of Switzerland and Europe in a globally connected world through research and teaching. As an interdisciplinary institution, it combines expertise from political science, economics, philosophy, history and law. The University of Basel has an international reputation of outstanding achievements in research and teaching. Founded in 1460, the University of Basel is the oldest university in Switzerland and has a history of success going back over 550 years.

The institute invites applications for a postdoctoral position as part of the SNSF Consolidator Grant project "The Battle of Materials: Commodity ’Research and Propaganda’ and the Road to Immoderate Consumption, 1900-1980", led by incoming Prof. Dr. Moritz von Brescius (Principal Investigator, PI). The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Project start is on September 1, 2025 or by mutual agreement.

The Consolidator Grant project examines the key processes, actors and cultural accommodations that drove unprecedented levels of natural resource consumption in industrial societies in the 20th century. Offering an innovative new material history of tropical and synthetic rubber and other industrial materials, the project explores the transformative practices that industrial research & development brought to the twentieth-century marketplace and the world economy as a whole. The team will address various aspects of resource overuse and the ways in which consumer expectations and material path dependencies have evolved as a key part of the "Great Acceleration" of human impacts on the global environment.

Your position

The postdoc project relates to work package 2 of the project: "Commodity Waste, Toxicity, and the Circular Economy". This project addresses the issue of commodity waste management and particularly recycling as a means of maintaining resource consumption at maximum levels even during supply shocks. The project will use the model of the circular economy to analyze what happened with modern consumer products and the huge industrial waste of hardly biodegradable scrap in times of both war and peace. It tackles the history of large international recycling industries since 1900 (esp. rubber) that navigated shifting global conjunctures of scarcity (as during military conflicts) and periods of material abundance and price slumps. Reuse and reprocessing are explored as the flip side of exponential commodity consumption in the last century. The Work Package also addresses the issue of coming to terms with modern materials’ long-unknown toxicity, which provoked (ongoing) societal debates over the possibilities of their reuse/repurposing as part of the built environment. The growing awareness of industrial commodities’ toxicity also mobilized civil society actors and environmental protest and advocacy groups, whose challenges opened up another ’front’ in the commercial "battle of materials". While cornucopian beliefs in unlimited growth and the infinite possibilities of modern industrial science and technology represented one powerful mindset of the "Great Acceleration", environmental anxieties and the search for less harmful material alternatives represented an increasingly important counterpart to the mass consumption of resources in the 20th century.

Your profile

• It is expected that the candidate holds a PhD degree in History (or a related discipline) at the start of the position with an excellent grade.
• The candidate must be fluent in English, the team’s working language, while additional language proficiencies relevant to the research, notably French, Dutch and/or German, are welcome.
• The candidate should have substantial experience in archival work and be familiar with the historiography of modern global environmental history, commodities and the circular economy. A demonstrated interest in recycling, toxicity and waste studies is an advantage.
• The candidate must take residence in Switzerland during the entire project period due to regular in-person team meetings (Jour Fixe) and be able to travel for archival research abroad.
• She/he should be keen to learn, be open to collaborative work, and eager to actively participate in the team efforts and long-term goals. These include the conceptualization and preparation of a public museum exhibition that will build on the research results of the Consolidator Grant project.
• The candidate will devote themselves full-time to the goals of the Consolidator Grant project to help achieve the project milestones and planned scholarly output.

We offer you

• We offer a funded postdoctoral position (80%, for 2+3 years) at the Europainstitut / Institute for European Global Studies of the University of Basel, Switzerland.
• The candidate will work in a motivated, international team that will help them pursue their ambitious scholarly ideas, research, and career in a stimulating, welcoming and multicultural environment.
• The salary and social benefits will be provided according to the rules of the University of Basel.
• All team members can rely on already secured travel grants to conduct their research internationally.
• The PI has assembled an international academic Advisory Board that includes some leading scholars in environmental history, global history, economic history, gender history, the history of consumption, waste/toxicity studies, the history of science, Western imperialism, and the Anthropocene, including EIB Director Prof. Dr. Corey Ross. The team will benefit from these international networks in the form of regular workshops with external experts, where work in progress can be presented and discussed in a constructive, safe atmosphere.