PhD Position at the Central European University (Vienna, Austria): The Cultural Vanguard of Workers’ Movements

The Department of Historical Studies, Central European University (Vienna, Austria) in collaboration with the ProletGard ERC Starting Grant project, Kassák Foundation (Budapest, Hungary) is pleased to announce a PhD in

The Cultural Vanguard of Workers’ Movements: A Social History of East Central European Avant-Garde between the Two Wars

(ProletGard)

(Principal investigator: Gábor Dobó, host institution: Kassák Foundation, Hungary)

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, PhD students, 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. Through three thematic components, the project examines: 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 doctoral position

The successful candidate will be a member 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, art history, or museology. The PhD proposal, which forms part of the application material, shall demonstrate an interest in the history of labor and social movements and/or the history of art in the 19th and 20th centuries, and situate the envisioned doctoral project within one of the broad thematic areas outlined above.

The primary working language of the doctoral researcher must be 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.

Procedure

Candidates apply for a position in the PhD program in Comparative History at the Department of Historical Studies at CEU, following the departmental and the general application requirements and deadline at CEU.

The successful candidate will enroll in the PhD program in Comparative History, and, provided fulfillment of all program requirements, graduate from CEU. Financial support and doctoral supervision will be provided by CEU and the ProletGard project.

Application deadline: 4 February, 2026: Full details

Pre-application deadline: 5 January, 2026. Prior to application at CEU, please feel invited to share a short CV, your draft PhD project proposal (no more than two pages), and, if applicable, a writing sample with Gábor Dobó, dobo.gabor@pim.hu; Susan Zimmermann, zimmerma@ceu.edu.

The PI of the ProletGard project, Gábor Dobó, might contact you for an informal pre-interview.

Learn more