Médecine darwinienne dans le Belfast de la fin de siècle

3-year fully funded PhD project on ‘Evolution and the Hygienic City: Darwinian medicine in fin-de-siècle Belfast’

Call for applications

Applications are invited for a 3-year fully funded PhD project on ‘Evolution and the Hygienic City: Darwinian medicine in fin-de-siècle Belfast’ beginning October 2015 and based at Queen’s University Belfast.

The project will examine the arguments and activities of an influential group of medical practitioners who advocated public health measures strongly shaped by evolutionary theory in the period 1880-1925. Attention will be given to medical professionals such as William Graham (1859-1917), James Alexander Lindsay (1856-1931) and Johnson Symington (1851-1924) and public health activists like Henry O’Neill (1853-1914). Their promotion of evolutionary medicine will be set within specific spaces of medical inquiry and practice and traced across more diffuse scientific and political debates about public health and evolution. There is scope to revise these parameters and explore other spaces crucial to the pursuit of evolutionary medicine in Britain and Ireland between 1880 and 1940.

The project will be supervised by Dr Diarmid Finnegan (School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology (GAP)), Dr Caroline Sumpter (School of English), and Dr Michael Pierse (Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities). As well as benefiting from being part of the Society, Space and Culture research cluster in the School of GAP and from cross-faculty supervision, the project will also connect with the priority theme of the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities on 'Health, Wellbeing and the Humanities'.

The strategic DEL award covers fees (EU/UK only) and provides an annual maintenance grant (UK residency criteria apply) at RCUK rates. Applications should include an academic CV, details of two referees, transcripts of qualifications and a 300-word statement detailing what the applicant will bring to the project. In addition to an undergraduate Honours degree in geography, history of science/medicine or cognate subject, a relevant Masters degree (in process or completed) is desirable.

Prospective applicants should discuss the project with the principal supervisor (Dr Diarmid Finnegan: d.finnegan@qub.ac.uk) before submitting their applications. The deadline for applications, submitted via the Queen's University online portal [https://dap.qub.ac.uk/portal/user/u_login.php], is 26 January 2015 by 5pm.