PhD position on queer writers and artists of the European HIV/AIDS crisis
Do you want to delve into the archives of queer writers and artists who were involved in queer and trans communities and movements during the HIV/AIDS crisis in Europe? Come join our team! With this PhD, you will join the NWO Vidi project Fabulous Subjects: Queer Intellectuals and their Archives, participating actively in the intellectual life of a research group and contributing to an innovative study of queer organic intellectuals.
Your job
In this PhD, you will map and study the archive of queer art and literature produced during the HIV/AIDS crisis in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. You will build on existing scholarship on the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS in the Unites States (e.g., Crimp 1988; Hallas 2009; Triechler 1999), contribute to an emerging body of scholarship on various European contexts (e.g., Gordon 2025; Idier 2019; Mellink and Amelsvoort 2024), and focus on a selection of personal and movement archives. By mapping and studying this material, you will identify the specific function played by queer artists and writers – as “organic intellectuals” – during the HIV/AIDS crisis in Europe.
The research involves a collaboration with the European HIV/AIDS Archive (EHAA) in Berlin, which was established to produce a ‘queer counter-memory’ (Dziuban et al. 2022) of HIV/AIDS in Europe. EHAA holds a collection of oral histories accompanied by selected movement material, photographs, policy documents, and artworks.
This PhD is part of the larger NWO Vidi project Fabulous Subjects: Queer Intellectuals and their Archives, whose twofold goal is to develop a theory of the queer organic intellectual while identifying the specific features of queer intellectuals’ archives. The project focuses on the place of intellectuals in European queer and trans communities and movements from the 1970s to the present.