Building a Digital Philology of the Sahel

The end of a good book should be the start of a better one.

My book Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities followed the life and work of the Senegalese Muslim polymath Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945). While writing it, I kept encountering a problem that could not be resolved within the format of a single monograph: Kamara’s major historical work circulates in multiple versions, under multiple titles, and across different manuscript traditions.

These materials do not behave like a stable “text.” They behave more like a an archive in its own right. They are a set of overlapping textual witnesses that raise fundamental questions about authorship, textuality, historical reasoning, and geographic imagination.

The next phase of this work is the Kamara Portal: a Digital Philology of the Greater Western Sahel, a research platform based at the Chair of Transitions, Institute for Advanced Studies, Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique (UM6P) in Morocco.

The portal aims to build a multilingual digital edition and commentary environment for Kamara’s work. Instead of collapsing textual multiplicity into a single stabilized edition, the project treats variation as a research opportunity. Multiple manuscripts, translations, and interpretive perspectives will be brought into conversation within a shared digital space.

To help launch this work, I am now recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join the project.

We are inviting applications for a three-year Postdoctoral Fellowship connected to the Kamara Portal project.

The fellow will work with me to develop a digital research interface that anchors the project’s next phase. This work combines several modes of scholarship:

• Close philological and interpretive work on Kamara’s corpus

• Comparison across manuscript witnesses and textual variants

• Collaboration on multilingual commentary (Arabic, French, English)

• Participation in building a digital research environment for African and Islamic intellectual history

The position is ideal for a scholar interested in working at the intersection of:

• Islamic studies

• African intellectual history

• Manuscript studies and philology

• Comparative Literature

• Digital humanities

Reading knowledge of Arabic and French is strongly preferred.

The fellowship is based at Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco, within the Institute for Advanced Studies.

Beyond the core research work, the fellow will join a broader intellectual ecosystem that includes projects in:

• African humanities

• Digital scholarship

• The politics and future of knowledge production

Our goal is to develop a model for digital philology in African and Islamic intellectual history—one that preserves interpretive plurality while expanding the tools available for close reading and comparison.

Applicants should submit:

• Cover letter

• Curriculum vitae

• Writing sample (20–30 pages)

• Names and contact information for three referees

Full details and application information can be found here:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/unijobs/listing/407855?utm_source=insidehighered

If you know emerging scholars who might be interested please feel free to share the announcement.