Research Associate Opportunity – April 2026.

University of Glasgow, College of Arts and Humanities, School of Humanities.
Vacancy Reference: 192573.
Salary: Grade 7, £41,064 – £46,049 per annum.
Closing date: 7 April 2026 @23:45.

There is an exciting opportunity for a Research Associate to make a leading contribution to an ongoing six-year project (“Synergy-Plague. Reconstructing the environmental, biological, and societal drivers of plague outbreaks in Eurasia between 1300 and 1900 CE”; https://www.synergy-plague.org/ ), working with Principal Investigator, Professor Philip Slavin (University of Stirling) and Leading Collaborator, Professor Samuel Cohn (University of Glasgow). The successful applicant will be based at the University of Glasgow and will be co-supervised by Professor Cohn and Professor Slavin. 

The ERC Synargy-Plague Synergy project involves an international interdisciplinary team led by Professors Slavin, Nils Stenseth, Ulf Büntgen and Florent Sebbane. The main objective of the project is to expand understanding of the ecologies and mechanisms of plague transmission during the Second Pandemic over Eurasia and North Africa. The project is strongly interdisciplinary in character, involving a team of epidemiological modelling (Stenseth), palaeo-climatology (Büntgen), plague biology (Sebanne) and environmental history (Slavin). The project has embarked on its second year.

The team is presently exploring geographic regions yet to receive their deserved scholarly attention. These include former Venetian and Genoese colonies (collectively referred to as ‘Romania’) in the western Balkans, Pelopenese, Crete, Cyprus, Crimea, Anatolia and today’s Southern Russia. In addition, the team is interested in taking advantage of Venetian and Genoese notarial and commercial records in some Middle Eastern hubs (including Cairo and Damascus). The bulk of  these records are preserved in the Venetian and Genoese archives (mostly, in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia and Archivio di Stato di Genova), in addition to a series of Croatian and Montenegrin archives (Dubrovnik, Kotor etc).

The successful Research Associate will be involved collecting, photographing, transcribing, collating data related to plague outbreaks from the archives in question, inputting these into an ongoing global database of plague outbreaks, and will be involved in data analysis. The successful candidate will begin research with Venetian materials (months 1-12) and should progress to Genoese, Croatian and Montenegrin archives in months 13-36. 

For informal enquiries, please contact Professor Samuel Cohn, Samuel.cohn@glasgow.ac.uk or Professor Philip Slavin, Philip.slavin@stir.ac.uk

This post is full time with funding available for up to 36 months.

For more information on the role, the project, and to apply online: 

https://www.jobs.gla.ac.uk/job/research-associate-5839328

Closing date: 7 April 2026 @23:45