At a time when financial backing for doctoral research seems as scarce and elusive as fairy dust, it’s welcome news indeed that three fully funded PhD vacancies are being advertised at the University of Utrecht. Each one of these four-year positions is available within the European Research Council [ERC] project Sharing Knowledge in Learned and Literary Networks (SKILLNET): the Republic of Letters as a pan-European Knowledge Society. Headed by Dirk van Miert, this project is just embarking upon a fascinating five-year mission to mine the content of large quantities of early modern epistolaries and to consider thereby how participants in the knowledge-based civil society that referred to itself as the ‘Respublica Literaria’ transcended political, confessional, and language boundaries to evolve into a pan-European ‘knowledge commons’. This intriguing project will study lines of communication over the four centuries between 1400 and 1800 and will follow the subtle shifts as the members within this society themselves related to their ideal of such exchange.

The three PhD positions will focus on: the structure of networks; the history of concepts and discourse analysis; and mining for learned identities. The successful candidates will be supervised by Dirk van Miert, who is assistant professor of Early Modern Cultural History in the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht. A longstanding colleague of and friend to EMLO, Dirk is a member of the COST-funded ‘Reassembling the Republic of Letters’ project (headed by Cultures of Knowledge’s Howard Hotson), and — together with another valued contributor Paul Botley of the University of Warwick —  he is co-editor of the exemplary eight-volume edition of Joseph Justus Scaliger’s letters (the metadata of which was published in EMLO in February 2015).[1. The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger, ed. Paul Botley and Dirk van Miert, 8 vols (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2012; ISBN-13 978-2-600-01552-3).]

Applications for any one of the three available positions should be submitted by 20 October (with a view to commencing on 1 January 2018). Further details of this remarkable Republic of Letters project and its exciting investigations may be found here. Despite the somewhat severe countenance in many of his surviving portraits, we assume Scaliger would approve of the exciting research that’s gathering momentum at present in Utrecht!