How I got a postdoc at the University of Southern Denmark

Let me start with a bit of context:

I am a humanities scholar with a PhD in comparative literature. Doing a postdoc may be the norm in the physical sciences that involve lab work, but they aren't as common in the humanities.

This makes finding a humanities postdoc particularly challenging.

I am also aware of the debates (on Twitter) about postdocs being underpaid in the US and the UK, and why people are leaving academia for industry and alt-ac (alternative-academic) jobs. I fully support folks going for alt-ac jobs.

That said, the discourse about alt-ac jobs doesn't take into account folks from Global South. For someone like me who is on the fringes of the global market, there aren't too many options whether in academia or outside of it.

In the summer of 2019, I attended the Institute for World Literature (IWL) at Harvard. I met an incredible group of scholars, and attended two stimulating seminars: one on translation and the other on Borges.

When you attend the IWL, you're asked if you'd like to join the institute's Google group. They use this group to share news about upcoming conferences and seminars about world literature.

This is very important. Like many other things in academia, to get a postdoc position you need to be plugged into the right sort of network.

In April 2022, I received an email through from the IWL saying that the Hans Christian Andersen (HCA) Centre at the University of Southern Denmark was looking for a postdoctoral researcher. The email said the postdoc would research how Andersen's stories were read in Asia.

Andersen is one of the most widely read writers of the last two centuries. Many of his stories (like The Emperor's Clothes, The Ugly Duckling, and The Little Mermaid) have become part of our collective literary and cultural heritage.

The next day, I wrote an email to the professor (now the director of the HCA Centre) who had sent the email. I introduced my self, expressed my interest in applying for the position, and said I would love to work on how Andersen was read in South Asia.

I also asked him how many applications he was expecting. Some postdoc positions (at "prestigious" universities like Cambridge) receive thousands of applications, which means you stand less 0.001 percent chance of getting it. There is no need to apply for these positions.

Because the HCA Centre was looking for a very specific set of skills and academic background, the professor said he hoped to receive 50 applications. Also that he liked my idea of researching Andersen in South Asia.

I started drafting my proposal and kept the conversation with the professor going. My proposal began with a personal anecdote about how my aunt introduced me to Andersen's story "The Red Shoes" when I was nine.

Andersen wrote in Danish. My aunt read an English translation of the story, and then translated that into Urdu for us.

The anecdote helped me showcase my personal investment in the project. After narrating the anecdote, I talked about how translations of Andersen's stories started arriving in India during the 19th century.

Andersen's Victorian translators had reduced him to a "children's writer," but in India his works were not regarded as children's literature only. Not many scholars have paid attention to these complex cultural developments that took place in colonial India in the 19th century.

I also wrote that I'd like to investigate why Andersen's stories have been included in educational curricula in India and Pakistan. I ended the proposal by stating that my work would make an original contribution to Andersen's studies.

Along with the proposal, I submitted one of my papers that had been published in the Journal of World Literature in 2020.

In July, I received a report by the assessment committee. Coming from a American university, the assessment report was something new to me.

The assessment committee liked the proposal but said that my research plan was a bit generic, which was true. I had run out of space, so I wrote that I'd publish a couple of journal articles.

But the good thing was I now had the opportunity to reply to the committee's objection. So, I prepared a detailed month-by-month research plan for two years and submitted that.

On 15 Aug, I received an email that the committee would like to interview me on 31 Aug. The interview went well despite my patchy internet.

A couple hours after the interview, I received the job offer, which I accepted. I applied for a visa for me and my family and we moved to Denmark in December 2022.

Things that worked for me:

Networking: It's essential for anyone to be plugged into the right sort of networks. This is true for all professions. And it's your job to network. People and opportunities won't come to you.

Profile: During my PhD, I'd worked very hard on publishing scholarship on world literature, which is probably the trendiest topic in the field of comparative literature. Plus, my dissertation was on 19th century South Asian literature, and Andersen is a 19th century writer.

Research Proposal: I wrote a very impressive proposal. I can say this now because it worked. The proposal showed my personal investment, my skillset, and an original idea. Written in the voice of a confident scholar, it showed how I was the right fit for the position.

Below is a photo of the building in which my office is housed. It's a historically preserved building called the "Secular Convent for Noblewomen" and was build in 1505.