The Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven is recruiting three four-year, full-time PhD researchers to join EMLIT: Pluriactivity, Digitality, Mobility, and the Emergence of World Literature, a new research programme examining how contemporary world literature emerges under conditions shaped by changing forms of cultural labour, digital mediation, and mobility.
The three doctoral projects approach these questions from complementary perspectives:
Pluriactive Literary Labor and the Infrastructures of World Literature
This project investigates how emerging writers, translators, and other literary professionals build careers across multiple roles and institutions. It focuses in particular on the European CELA network and asks how pluriactive forms of literary labour shape professional trajectories, literary production, and the infrastructures through which contemporary literature circulates.
Digital Magazines and the Emergence of Contemporary World Literature
This project explores the role of digital literary magazines such as Asymptote in the emergence and circulation of contemporary world literature. It examines how digital platforms shape literary circulation and translation, professional identities, transnational networks, and textual forms.
Writer’s Residencies and the Emergence of World Literature
This project examines writers’ residencies as sites of literary mobility and creativity through comparative research on European residency programmes, their participants, and the literary works produced in and around them. It asks how residency infrastructures influence literary careers, creative practices, networks, and transnational circulation.
Applications
All three positions are full-time, four-year PhD appointments at KU Leuven.
Applications are welcome through 30 September 2026. Full details concerning the projects, candidate profiles, working conditions, and application procedure are available via the vacancy links above.
The projects will be supervised by Jack McMartin, Núria Codina Solà, and Pieter Vermeulen.
We warmly encourage prospective candidates working at the intersections of world literature, translation, literary sociology, digital culture, cultural labour, and mobility to apply and would be grateful to colleagues for sharing these opportunities widely through their networks.
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