18 March 2025
We are looking for a PhD candidate within the Daily Bread team, consisting of the PI, 1 postdoc and 2 PhD candidates. The Daily Bread project focuses on two fundamental and connected historical questions: How did ordinary people shape politics in the period before institutionalized democracy? And how has power shaped archives, determining whose histories have been written, and whose have been silenced? It does so by, on the one hand, examining the impact of food protests, their interrelation with environmental crises and local food cultures. On the other hand, it examines the ways in which the actors in these protests—often women—have and have not been included in the archival records, drawing among others on scholarship dealing with archival silencing.
The Daily Bread project will compare food protests between circa 1500-1800 in Dutch, Italian, and Ottoman cities. In its methodology, the project merges social history’s attention for the politically disenfranchised with cultural history’s sensitivity to the impact of power on archives and history-writing. It also draws on insights from environmental and comparative urban history. Its primary objectives are to 1) recast the debate on how ordinary men and women shaped pre-democratic politics; 2) advance the agenda of comparative urban history; 3) answer environmental historians’ call to examine societal responses to climate change. Ultimately, the project aims to uncover the power relations at play in the streets, the archive, and the production of history.
We are looking for a PhD candidate who will focus on the subproject on famine, urban protest, and food cultures in the Milanese state (ca. 1550-1800). The preference is for the PhD to focus on the city of Milan. Milan saw significant demographic crises in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, caused by epidemics and famines. Certain famine-related protests loom large, such as a famous Rivolta del Pane in 1628; others have left few traces in the literature and are yet to be analyzed. This subproject will explore the ways in which these protests developed, what their impact was, and trace how they have been recorded in both archives and early modern writing. Moreover, this project offers the possibility of examining how the introduction of new food stuffs interacted with food protests.
We are looking for a PhD candidate who will focus on the subproject on famine and urban protest in the Dutch Republic. With its unique urban landscape and political organization, the Dutch Republic has produced a wealth of relevant sources to examine urban protests. Moreover, its economic structure and unusual environment allowed it to thrive during the period when the Little Ice Age reached its coldest point. The combination of innovations in digital analysis, particularly text recognition, and the fast-moving digitization of Dutch sources offer this subproject a technological edge. Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, the PhD will track protests in a broad corpus of different sources, in order to compare protests in different Dutch cities.