LUCAS – PhD Position on early colonial North America
Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) invites applications for a
PhD position within the project Leveraging Language, Proclaiming Power: Linguistic Politics in Early Colonial North America (1.0 fte, 4 years)
The PhD candidate will be working within the research project ‘Leveraging Language, Proclaiming Power’, funded by the Dutch Research Council’s Vidi scheme, and directed by dr. Alisa van de Haar (university lecturer in historical French literature at Leiden University). Prof. Michiel van Groesen (professor of maritime history at Leiden University) will be the co-supervisor of the PhD candidate.
The overall project
This project examines the interplay between communication choices and power dynamics in early colonial North America (1604–1664). Seventeenth-century North America was a crossroads of intercultural contact, where European colonizers, Indigenous peoples, and—through enslavement—African individuals converged, creating a complex multilingual environment. To navigate this linguistic landscape, settlers and Indigenous communities developed diverse communication strategies. These practices were not neutral: every language choice (from using interpreters to imposing a specific language) carried power implications, determining who held control in an encounter. During the early decades of European settlement in what Europeans called New Netherland, New France, Virginia, and New England, a continuous dynamic developed between language practices and shifting power balances. This site of tricontinental linguistic interaction presents a valuable opportunity to improve our understanding of how language and communication reflect and shape power dynamics in multilingual societies.
This project investigates five key multilingual interactions: among settlers; between competing colonies; between colonists and Indigenous communities; between colonists and enslaved individuals; and in communication with European leadership. The research team consists of comprising the Principal Investigator (Alisa van de Haar), the PhD, and a Postdoctoral researcher who will join the project in September 2027. Through comparative analyses, this team will improve our understanding of intercontinental interactions, multilingual practices, and the broader mechanisms of power structures through the lens of language.
The PhD position
This doctoral research project will examine how communicative practices in seventeenth-century New Netherland, New France, New England, and Virginia reflected and shaped power dynamics. It will examine which choices were made with regard to communication and language in encounters within individual settlements (including enslaved inhabitants), between settlements and colonies, and in interactions with Indigenous populations. For each of these communications choices, its power implications will then be assessed. The research will focus on a multilingual corpus including handwritten and printed materials covering the period 1604 to 1664. Rather than a linguistic study, the PhD project entails a historical analysis of the social implications of language choices. The final dissertation will offer new insights into the interplay between language strategies and power structures in French, Dutch, and English colonies.