The Department of History and Art History of Utrecht University seeks to appoint a three year Post-Doc position to conduct research on "The Republic of Letters as an Institution for Collective Action". This research is a sub-project of the ERC Consolidator project "Sharing Knowledge in Learned and Literary Networks (SKILLNET): the Republic of Letters as a pan-European Knowledge Society", led by Dr. Dirk van Miert.
In the sub-project, the Postdoc will seek answers to the question to what extent the early modern international scientific and scholarly community that called itself "the Republic of Letters" can be conceptualized as an institution for collective action or even a common property regime. The investigation aims to shed light on the institutional and social dynamics structuring conduct and behavior, and, hence, on the Republic of Letters' ideals of knowledge. There are numerous sub-questions to address. To what extent were principles of the commons, which arose coevally with the Republic of Letters, also at work in the Republic of Letters? How did the Republic of Letters, as a virtual community, compete or cooperate with the University, the Académie, the Salon, and the disciplinary 'societies'? How did author rights develop in relation to the 'common good' of the Republic of Letters? What was the nature of the information that was shared in the Republic of Letters: data or 'knowledge' - indeed, what exactly did its members define as the common good? Did the 'two cultures' of science and humanities arise from fundamental differences in knowledge ideals among different scholarly communities? What were the principles underlying the creation and workings of trust in communication between its participants? What were Republic of Letters' sanctioning systems or choice-making systems?
The deliverables of the project consist of at least five articles. These may be subsequently collected into a monograph. All publications will be published in Open Access.
