Call for Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellows
Join our team as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow!
See how we did
Tallinn University's School of Humanities invites young and talented researchers to express their interest in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship programme (MSCA PF). The MSCA PF is a prestigious grant aimed at enhancing the creative and innovative potential of researchers. It provides funding for 12-24 months of research, focusing on career development and close work with a supervisor to acquire new skills. The fellowship includes a salary, mobility allowance, family allowance (if applicable), and research expenses. The application deadline for the MSCA PF is mid-September, so now is the time to find your host and start preparing your proposal!
As the host institution, we are excited to offer candidates the opportunity to work with exceptional supervisors with extensive experience (more information about our fields and supervisors below). In addition to ensuring that candidates receive the best possible guidance and support, we are also providing a unique onsite proposal writing training opportunity; suitable for any levels of experience, as the training progressively moves from basic notions to most challenging aspects of the proposal preparation. Our 5-day fully hands-on training, which takes place from 10-14 July, will include guidelines, short workshops from research advisers, and ongoing discussions and support from both the advisers and supervisors throughout the writing process. Accommodation, meals, and travel support will be provided, but spaces for this training are limited.
To be considered for the opportunity, candidates will undergo a pre-selection process based on their CV, project idea and motivation. There are three main eligibility requirements:
- Applicants must hold a PhD and have at most 8 years of full-time research experience.
- Applicants of any nationality are welcome, but they must not have lived or worked in Estonia for more than 12 months during the 3 years leading up to the closing date of the call on 13 September 2023 (mobility rule).
- Applicants must choose Tallinn University as their host institution.
To apply, candidates must complete the registration form and submit the following documents (PDF format) as attachments by 7 May 2023:
- One-page motivation statement that includes the background of the candidate and career goals, the idea of the project and how it intersects with the supervisor’s expertise (and Tallinn University).
- CV (maximum 3 pages)
The selection process will be a collaborative effort between the supervisors and our research advisers. Selected candidates will be contacted by 20 May and informed of the next steps in the process, which include joint preparation of an MSCA PF application with their supervisor, as well as participation in the training provided.
If you cannot find a supervisor who matches your research topic, please feel free to reach out to us, and we will assist you in finding a suitable mentor. For this or any other further questions, please contact Tanya Escudero (escudero@tlu.ee).
History
Karsten Brüggemann is a Professor of Estonian and General History. His research interests include the history of the Baltic states and Russia / Soviet Union, cultural history, transnational history, memory and history and history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He led the projects “A Transnational Setting for Estonian History: Transcultural Entanglements, International Organisations and Transborder Migrations” and “Adapting to modernity: The Estonian society`s response to political, social, economical and cultural challenges in times of transformation (16th–20th centuries)”. Full CV
Marek Tamm is a Professor of cultural history at Tallinn University. He is also Head of the Tallinn University Centre of Excellence in Intercultural Studies and a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. His primary research fields are cultural history of medieval Europe, theory and methodology of history, digital history, and cultural memory studies. He has recently published, as editor, The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (with Peeter Torop, 2022), A Cultural History of Memory in the Early Modern Age (with Alessandro Arcangeli, 2020), Making Livonia: Actors and Networks in the Medieval Baltic Sea Region (with Anu Mänd, 2019), Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism (with Laurent Olivier, 2019) and Debating New Approaches to History (with Peter Burke, 2018). He has a rich experience in project leading, currently, he is the PL of the 5-year project “Digital Livonia: For a Digitally Enhanced Study of Medieval Livonia (c. 1200–1550)”, funded by the Estonian Research Council. Full CV
Human Geography and Urban Studies
Tauri Tuvikene is a Professor of Urban Studies at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University. His research covers urban and cultural geography, particularly on the intersection of urban cultures, mobilities, cities, and policies. His research interests include (re)conceptualisation of post-socialism and experiences and regulations of urban mobility ranging from automobility to walking. He has published on these topics in journals such as IJURR, City, Geoforum, Current Sociology, and others, and has co-edited books Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures (2019, Routledge) and If Cars Could Walk: Postsocialist Streets in Transformation (2023, Berghahn). He has led the HERA-funded project PUTSPACE "Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting" and is currently PI of the project “Capacities for Resilient and Inclusive Urban Public Transport Infrastructure and Built Environment”, funded by JPI Urban Europe. Full CV
Hannes Palang is a Professor of Human Geography, the Head of the Centre for Landscape and Culture at Tallinn University and President of the Estonian Geographical Society. His research interests include interactions of landscape, culture and history. He has published over a hundred academic articles and edited 13 volumes and special issues and is the incoming Editor in Chief of Landscape Research. He has implemented several national and international research projects and is currently the Principal Investigator of the project “Landscape approach to rurbanity”, funded by the Estonian Research Council. Full CV
Tarmo Pikner is an Associate Professor of Human Geography. His research interests include urbanity dynamics, and how it forms relations between culture, nature and technology; assemblages of significant environmental change, heritage and Anthropocene appearances, and social theories to understand cultural and spatiotemporal dimensions of social change. He is the Principal Investigator of the project “Baltic Sea2Land”, funded by Interreg Baltic Sea Region. Full CV
Comparative Literature
Eneken Laanes is a Professor of Comparative Literature and the project leader of "Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena", funded by the European Research Council. Her research interests include transnational literature and memory, trauma studies, post-socialist memory cultures in Eastern Europe, multilingual literature autobiography and lifewriting, the historical novel, critical theory and cultural analysis. Her research is increasingly situated at the intersection of various artistic media such as literature, film and art. Full CV
Semiotics
Daniele Monticelli is a Professor of Semiotics and Translation Studies. His research is characterized by a wide and interdisciplinary range of interests which include translation studies and, particularly, translation history, philosophy of language, literary semiotics, Italian studies and contemporary critical theory. He has authored over 60 academic articles and has edited 6 collections of papers in five different languages. He is the Principal Investigator of the project “Translation in History, Estonia 1850-2010: Texts, Agents, Institutions and Practices”, funded by the Estonian Research Council. Full CV
Igor Pilshchikov is a Research Professor of Semiotics of Culture and Russian Literature at Tallinn University and Professor & Chair of the UCLA Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages & Cultures. His research interests include cultural semiotics, comparative literature, literary theory, verse theory, digital humanities and the history of Russian literature. He has authored three books and over two hundred scholarly articles (published in eleven languages worldwide) and edited over twenty volumes and special issues. He currently leads the project “Around the World and Back Again: A Global Typology of the Reception of Estonian Semiotics”, funded by the Estonian Research Council. Full CV
Translation Studies
Daniele Monticelli is a Professor of Semiotics and Translation Studies. His research is characterized by a wide and interdisciplinary range of interests which include translation studies and, particularly, translation history, philosophy of language, literary semiotics, Italian studies and contemporary critical theory. He has authored over 60 academic articles and has edited 6 collections of papers in five different languages. He is the Principal Investigator of the project “Translation in History, Estonia 1850-2010: Texts, Agents, Institutions and Practices”, funded by the Estonian Research Council. Full CV
Anthropology
Carlo Cubero is an Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology whose research is divided into two strands. The first involves the development of audiovisual methods for anthropological research, including directing documentaries, creating sound-works, and curating ethnographic film and sound programmes. The second strand focuses on the complexities of Caribbean island life, particularly the concept of "transinsularism" as a means of productively engaging with the contradictions of Caribbean island identities. Full CV
Eeva Kesküla is an Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Her research interests are the anthropology of work and energy transitions. Her research has focused on global location-independent workers and the post-Soviet working class in Estonia and Kazakhstan, looking at the labour process, gender at work, work ethic, industrial health and safety. She led the Estonian Research Council-funded project "The political economy of industrial health and safety: a social anthropology perspective", and is currently involved in the H2020 project “CINTRAN: Carbon Intensive Regions in Transition - Unravelling the Challenges of Structural Change”. She is the co-lead for the Global Humanities Institute 2023 Post-extractivist legacies and landscapes: Humanities, artistic and activist responses. Full CV
Linguistics
Anna Verschik is a Distinguished Professor of General Linguistics and the Head of the doctoral curriculum in linguistics. Her scholarly interests include language contacts, multilingualism, sociolinguistics in the Baltic countries, contacts of Yiddish in the Baltic area and the sociolinguistic situation of post-Soviet countries from a comparative perspective. She has authored over a hundred articles on these topics. More recently, she has also published on mediated receptive multilingualism (how Estonians understand Ukrainian based on their proficiency in Russian) and is interested in the emerging Ukrainian-Estonian bilingualism. Full CV
Reili Argus is a Professor of Estonian Language. Her research interests include psycholinguistics and first language acquisition, word formation in Estonian, morphology, and language editing. She has conducted cross-linguistic research in the acquisition of diminutives, evidentiality and deontic modality. The main focus of her research has been on the acquisition of Estonian morphology, as well as on the acquisition of lexico-semantic and pragmatic categories. She works also on topics connected with language planning and practical use of language and has written a chapter on the Estonian language in the book Uralic Languages (2023). She has been involved in projects supporting language development, e.g. the creation of the FREPY set of language learning games, and the collection of child language corpora. Full CV
English Studies
Julia Kuznetski is a Professor of English and Head of English Studies at Tallinn University. Her research interests include literary theory, film studies, literature by women, gender, identity and crisis studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, postcolonial theory, body, transcorporeality, diasporic and migrant literature, and dystopia. She is the author of a number of publications in these areas, including a co-edited volume (with Silvia Pellicer-Ortín) titled Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing (Routledge, 2019), a special journal issue of Women: A Cultural Review “We Too”: Female Voices in the Transnational Era of Crises, Migration, Pandemic and Climate Change' (2023) and articles such as “Disempowerment and Bodily Agency in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and The Handmaid’s Tale TV Series” (The European Legacy 2021) and “Estonian literature and Ecofeminism” (with Kadri Tüür, Routledge 2022) and is currently co-editing The Routledge Companion to Literature and Crisis (2024). Kuznetski is a founding member of the gender studies research group at Tallinn University. Full CV
Chinese Studies
Lisa Indraccolo is an Associate Professor of Chinese Studies. She earned her PhD (2010) from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice with a thesis on the early Chinese “sophistic” persuader Gongsun Long. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, and actively participated in the interdisciplinary research cluster University Research Priority Programme “Asia and Europe”. Her main research interests include early Chinese thought, with focus on so-called “Masters texts” (zishu) and Warring States philosophical literature; Classical Chinese rhetoric, paradoxes, and language jokes; structural and rhetorical patterns of early Chinese texts; conceptual and intellectual history of premodern China, also from a comparative perspective; and early cross-cultural encounters between China and Japan. She is currently Vice President of the European Association for Chinese Studies and affiliated member of the Zurich Center for the Study of the Ancient World (ZAZH). Full CV
Results of the call
The School of Humanities at Tallinn University (TÜHI) has received an overwhelming response to its call for expressions of interest for the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships launched in April, with a total of 42 applications from scholars based in 20 countries across Europe, Asia, America, and Africa.
The diverse range of academic fields represented in the applications includes Anthropology, Human Geography, Literature, Translation Studies, History, Urban Studies, Linguistics, and Chinese Studies.
Out of the pool of applicants, TÜHI has selected 14 candidates who will attend a 5-day onsite grant writing camp in July and will collaborate closely with supervisors, trainers, and research advisors to prepare their applications for the prestigious call in September. The purpose of this collaboration is to enhance the candidates' chances of securing the fellowship. If successful, this opportunity will enable them to conduct cutting-edge research in their respective fields. Moreover, the presence of such brilliant international researchers at TÜHI would foster a dynamic and diverse research environment, encouraging the exchange of ideas and knowledge, and contribute to the School's reputation as a hub for exceptional scholarly talent.
The event is organized in cooperation with the Tallinn University Centre of Excellence in Intercultural Studies and it is supported by the (European Union) European Regional Development Fund (Tallinn University’s ASTRA project, activity A7).