This funded PhD opportunity at Trinity College Dublin will be of particular interest to students in Russian, Czech, or Slovak studies.
***
4-year doctoral award
“The Radical Left, The Avant-Garde, and the Rise of Dictatorship in Interwar Europe”
Deadline for applications: 15 May 2021
Applicants are sought for a fully-funded four-year Provost’s PhD Project Award to start a PhD at Trinity College Dublin in September 2021 or March 2022 on a subject arising from the research project ‘The Radical Left, the Avant-Garde, and the Rise of Dictatorship in Interwar Europe’ led by Dr Molly Pucci at Trinity College Dublin.
The award comprises the student’s full PhD tuition fees (EU or non-EU) and an annual stipend of €17,316. Trinity’s Provost’s PhD Project Awards are generously funded through alumni donations and Trinity’s Commercial Revenue Unit.
Applications for the award should include a personal statement, research proposal (max. 5 pages), curriculum vitae, transcripts of degree results, and two academic references. Prospective students should send these documents to Eilís Dunne at pghishum@tcd.ie by the deadline on 15 May 2021. The successful candidate will then make a formal application to TCD via the my.tcd.ie portal and be issued with a formal offer in the same manner as other incoming PhD students.
Applications will not be considered complete until referees have submitted their references. Applicants will be notified of the outcome of their application by the end of June. Unsuccessful candidates will be considered for other available funding. If the successful candidate does not have English as a first language, s/he will also be required to submit evidence of English language competence at this stage.
Trinity College Dublin is committed to policies, procedures and practices which do not discriminate on grounds such as gender, civil status, family status, age, disability, race, religious belief, sexual orientation or membership of the travelling community. On that basis we encourage and welcome talented people from all backgrounds to join our staff and student body. Trinity’s Diversity Statement can be viewed in full at https://www.tcd.ie/diversity-inclusion/diversity-statement.
Further enquiries: Dr Molly Pucci (puccim@tcd.ie)
Description of the Project:
As communists and fascists pulled politics to unprecedented extremes in interwar Europe, artists declared that a “Surrealist Revolution” had overtaken France. Surrealism, as it became known, declared that dreams had conquered intellect and an eerie reality of “whisperings, silence, and sparks” had more to say about humanity than rationality, science, and progress. The movement soon became international and left a deep impression on the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, and poetry, as well as politics and philosophy. It emerged at a time that witnessed the simultaneous rise of the two most brutal dictatorships in history: Hitler’s Germany on the right, and Stalin’s Soviet Union on the left. Since Surrealism and other avant garde movements were often associated with the radical political left—anarchism, communism, and socialism—they both embodied and furthered the radicalization of European politics in the era after the First World War.
This project will examine how radical leftist cultural movements in Europe developed from 19th century ideas, whether nationalism, social democracy, imperialism, and anarchism, trends that became more extreme in the 1920s and 1930s. While most studies of the era explain dictatorship and political polarization by focusing on the politics of the age, this project rethinks the era through the lens of leftist art, culture, and intellectual life. For the artists and writers of the age the link between culture and politics was self-evident. The idea of cultural revolution, later associated with Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (a contemporary of the period) saw the fusion of Marxism and the radical left with artistic experimentation, anti-imperialism, and the creation of an Italian national identity. This project explores these trends from a multi-national perspective to better understand links between culture and politics, philosophy and activism, art and language, and the similarities between the rise of the radical left and radical right in the decades between the First and Second World Wars.
Since this will be a multi-national project, I welcome applications from students interested in working on the history of the radical left or avant garde in interwar Europe in one or more of the following countries: Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, or Russia. Comparative and multi-national projects are welcome. Applicants with the ability to read one or more of these languages are highly encouraged.
Potential applicants are invited to email the Principal Investigator, Dr Molly Pucci (puccim@tcd.ie) to consult on their research proposal.