The Kassák Foundation invites applications for 2 postdoctoral research positions within the ERC funded ProletGard – The Cultural Vanguard of Workers’ Movements: A Social History of East Central European Avant-Garde between the Two Wars project.
Project description
This five-year ERC-funded research project examines how avant-garde art contributed to the formation of a workers’ movement counterculture in East Central Europe and beyond. This project argues that East Central European socialist, including avant-garde periodicals, groups, and figures were instrumental both in shaping the avant-garde and the local branches of transnational workers’ movements. Focusing on the newly formed nation-states after the dissolution of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, including Austrian, Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Yugoslavian, and Romanian lands, as well as parts of Poland and Italy, and related diasporas, the project highlights the shared imperial history that influenced subsequent counter-hegemonic tendencies and ongoing changes and departures in the interwar period, including avant-garde and socialist movements. A multidisciplinary and multilingual team of researchers (composed by the PI, postdoctoral researchers, a PhD student, and a museum curator) converges methodologies spanning from labor, social, media and literary history to museology to grasp how avant-garde techniques were absorbed and transformed by workers’ movements, creating a counterculture in East Central Europe between 1918 and 1939.
What we expect
The successful candidates will be members of the project team of the ERC research project ProletGard. Applicants with a background in one or more of the following interdisciplinary fields of study are invited to apply: labor history, media history, gender history, literary history, or art history. The motivation letter should also outline briefly the applicant’s original, autonomous research project and relate it directly to all three thematic components of the ProletGard project outlined below.
The primary working language of the postdocs must be either Romanian, Czech, Slovak, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Slovene, Polish, Yiddish, or Ukrainian, in addition to an excellent command of English. Candidates combining more than one of the local languages are encouraged to apply.
You will work under the guidance of the PI as a member of a team of six researchers.
The three thematic components are the following:
1) the transnational circulation of avant-garde, and socialist press that transgressed administrative, cultural, and linguistic borders;
2) the reading and performing practices related to East Central European socialist, especially avant-garde journals that established new forms of collective interpretation of social reality within working-class milieus, both in theory and practice; and
3) avant-garde periodicals as sites of negotiation between conventional and innovative cultural techniques within workers’ movements.
The project goes through the themes in this sequence, one year is dedicated to each. The final year is dedicated to the elaboration of the research outputs. You are expected to participate at project meetings and workshops, in-person and online, and present your findings, help with organizing project events, editing project publications and contribute to the maintenance of the project website.
The research project and the postdoctoral positions are managed by the Kassák Foundation, Budapest. Postdoctoral team members may choose either to relocate to Budapest or to fulfil the project requirement of regular on-site presence (i.e., several days per month, based on a pre-arranged schedule through which all team members are brought together at the Kassák Foundation’s office in Budapest). Moderate financial support for relocation or, alternatively, for regular travel to Budapest is foreseen. The successful candidate will be employed in accordance with the Hungarian Labor Code. Employment conditions, including taxation and social security obligations, will be governed by applicable Hungarian legislation and relevant international agreements. Specific arrangements may depend on the candidate’s individual circumstances, including tax residence and nationality.
What we offer
We offer two full-time (40 hours per week) positions with a two-year employment contract (1 January 2027 to 31 December 2028), renewable for two years (1 January 2029 to 31 December 2030), after an interim evaluation.
The gross salary is set at € 49,000 per year corresponding with a 100% position.
The starting date is 1 January 2027.
Funding for research trips, participation in conferences and workshops, and open access fees will be provided.
Your qualifications
Applicants are required to hold a PhD, preferably related to one of the earlier mentioned research fields, by 1 January 2027.
Proficiency in English and in at least one of the local languages of the region is required.
How to apply
Send us by 1 May 2026 the latest to the following email address: dobo@kassakfoundation.org, and csejdy@kassakfoundation.org:
- CV and a list of publications
- a motivation letter, also indicating which focus language(s) the applicant wants to study and why (max. 1500 words)
- a writing sample (no longer than 7000 words)
- contact details (name, address, phone number, email) of two referees. (Please, do not send letters of reference.)