Cambridge University seeks Stephen Hawking archivist

The Stephen Hawking archive was acquired by the university last month

Cambridge University is looking for an archivist to take on the "challenging task" of cataloguing 160 boxes of Prof Stephen Hawking's work.

The University Library acquired the 10,000-page archive belonging to the world-renowned physicist last month.

It will be the two-year job of a new archivist to catalogue the documents, enabling researchers to access them in the future.

Prof Hawking, who lived and worked in Cambridge, died on 14 March 2018.

The vast archive includes scientific papers, letters dating from 1944-2008 and his assistants' notebooks.

There are also film and TV scripts - including for the Oscar-winning film The Theory of Everything, The Simpsons, and The X-Files.

When Prof Hawking's archive was acquired, Prof Stephen J Toope, vice-chancellor of the university, said: "His legacy lives on through this archive, which will inspire countless generations of young people with the same ambition as Stephen - to challenge our knowledge of, and help us understand our place in, the universe."

A section from Prof Hawking's breakthrough paper which suggested that black holes were not completely black

The new project archivist will create a catalogue which will be published online, with the contents later made available for research purposes.

While "substantial experience cataloguing archives to professional standards" is an essential skill, it would be "desirable" for the successful candidate to have "an interest and or/knowledge of post-war and contemporary science", the job particulars state.

The script of Prof Hawking's first appearance on The Simpsons is included in the archive

Dr Katrina Dean, keeper of archives and modern manuscripts at the library, said: "I don't doubt it's going to be a challenging task.

"One of the roles will be to try and understand the context of Prof Hawking's work - who he was working with, and when."

However, she added: "We don't work in a vacuum. We work with colleagues and we have experts here within the university."

Stephen Hawking died in 2018, aged 76

Prof Hawking's former office in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University will also be preserved, and reconstructed at the Science Museum in London.