Positions
Two Student Assistant Positions for Projects on Slave Trade in Maritime Asia (0.4 fte) (IISH) – deadline 15 June 2025
The International Institute of Social History (IISH-KNAW) has vacancies for two Student Assistants (0.4 fte) for projects on slave trade in Asia for a period of one year.
The Project ‘Global Business of Slave Trade’ studies the main patterns of the Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish slave trades in the Indian Ocean, Indonesian Archipelago, and the South China Sea. It will do so by examining in detail how and by whom were these commercial flows and operations organized, who gained and lost by being involved in these activities, and what participation in these commercial streams meant for the economies of these European Empires in Asia. The database project Exploring Slave Trade in Asia (ESTA) reconstructs the historical slave trade in the wider Indian Ocean, Indonesian Archipelago, and East Asia.
The Student Assistants will work as part of the research team to enter and curate data on slave trade, business, actors, etc. in the ESTA database, to collect digital source materials, to create ground truth transcriptions and layout for Spanish and Portuguese digital colonial archival material (to train handwritten text recognition models), to annotate transcriptions for entity (and event) detection, and to assist in organising project events and other tasks.
Applications should be submitted ultimately 15 June 2025 via the KNAW portal.
