Research Apprenticeships

For an ongoing project on Afrofuturism led by a faculty member in the law school, assistance is sought for bibliographical research.  Some experience in African-American studies or Cultural Studies is desirable.  Student would join a team and would be expected to work 2-4 hours a week.  

Assistance sought for curating an exhibit, “Gateway to the East: China in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair” at Olin Library.  The RA will join a team of staff, students and faculty, and will help compile the exhibition list. 

Research assistance needed for the final stages of work on a book manuscript entitled Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the American Right. The RA will help research important Branson productions such as Shepherd of the Hills; compile annotated bibliographies on important topics such as the idea of the frontier, Disney theme parks, and the Experience Economy; and fact-check citations. Four to six hours a week. 

A crossover book series about "the hidden lives of ordinary things." The research assistant will read contracted manuscripts (c. 30,000 words), checking facts and producing a written report (no more than one-page) on each manuscript.  Roughly 3 hours weekly.  Advanced reference-checking skills required. Since efficiency and precision are so crucial to this position, the first three weeks of this R.A.-ship will be probationary (though fully paid). 

Professor seeks research assistant to help with editorial and research projects for publications on African American political thought. Work includes research assistance for a book project, Freedom, Dissimulation, and Resistance in African American Political Thought. This project reconstructs debates about the efficacy and ethics of the dissimulation in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century African American political thought and investigates the real-life tactics that African American intellectuals and activists employed in their own lives and careers.

RA will have strong research, organizational and editing skills and be able to work 3-5 hours both in Fall and Spring semesters.

Assistance needed for work on a book on Love in Time, which proposes a view of love for religious, ethical, and political thought. The project spans different literatures in philosophy, critical theory, religious thought, literary theory, and art criticism. The research assistant will be asked to conduct literature reviews for sources concerning the central interlocutors in the text, and to extract formal bibliographies and citations for the texts under discussion. The R.A. may also be asked to assist with light editorial work necessary for preparing manuscripts for submission.  The work requires strong organizational skills and research skills; no foreign languages required. Roughly 4 hours per week.

Undergraduate research assistant sought for remote work on a developing project about modernist studies, queer theory, and digital humanities. No experience in these scholarly fields is required, but some familiarity with navigating journals and databases through our library website is recommended. Student should be comfortable working with Excel, meeting deadlines, and asking questions. All other skills will be developed over the course of the semester. Approximately 4 hours/week, with one biweekly meeting via Zoom. Possibility to continue work for multiple semesters.

Professor of Korean Languages and Literature & Comparative Literature seeks a research assistant for a project on the travels of Korean intellectuals in the early 20th century, I am looking for a student interested in digital map-making with historical data. Experience in digital methodologies and digital humanities (DH) tools will be an asset; reading knowledge of Korean/Japanese/Chinese language and culture would also be helpful but is not necessary. The tasks will involve designing and generating digital maps. Workload per week is flexible and will not exceed 6 hours per week. 

Germanic Languages and Literatures Professor seeks research assistant to organize archival material (written and acoustic) for a book on German-language radio drama in the aftermath of the Second World War. The project explores the soundscapes of these works composed for radio in the context of discourses about the politics of listening and memory. Time commitment is 2-4 hours a week. Required skills: reading knowledge of German, ability to work with basic word processing and spreadsheet software, familiarity with sound editing software (preferred, but can be taught!), good time management and communication.

Professor of Classics seeks assistance in examining and interpreting evidence for music in the performance of ancient Greek and Roman theatre. Assistant will read ancient plays looking for evidence of music, find relevant bibliography in electronic databases, print bibliographies, and other works, and help compile a database of rhythmic variation in ancient drama. The following skills are desirable but not required: some knowledge of ancient Greek and/or Latin, experience in theatre, and the ability to read music. Student can work up to 6 hours per week, including a weekly meeting. 

For final manuscript preparation of a book on Shakespeare and his Italian sources, assistance is sought in checking quotations, basic proof-reading, bibliography.  PI may also need assistance in surveying and summarizing recent critical literature on the topic. Familiarity with Zotero would be helpful.  Knowledge of Italian ideal, but not necessary.  2-6 hours of work a week. 

 

Undergraduate student research assistant needed 5 hours/week to assist with data review and management for the Moving Stories Project. The RA will review flagged user submissions to the project’s proprietary app to ensure they adhere to project guidelines; define categories and keywords for submissions and tagging entries appropriately; and manage data.  There will be opportunities for quantitative textual analysis and for technical support for the app kiosks at the Moving Stories Exhibition (February-March 2024 at the Luminary) during high traffic times.  The RA will need basic Excel skills for the database management.  Since we expect submissions in a variety of languages representing the local community, foreign language skills will be helpful, although they are not required. 

 

Student with experience in web development sought to assist in the construction of an app to facilitate user-friendly queries of two linguistic corpora (one greek, one Sanskrit). Some familiarity with XML and some background in linguistics desirable. 

“Network Poetics: The Big World of African Little Magazines” examines the poetry of two African little magazines, Okyeame and Transition, and will turn the names, locations, and works of the poets, artists, and writers into metadata. This metadata will then be visualized through a network model to highlight the expansive nature of African little magazines. 

Research Assistant Duties Include: Weekly meetings, research, documentation for metadata; data entry; refinement of metadata categories. Experience in interpretation of poetry required.  Desired skills include proficiency in Twi, Fante, or French; familiarity with African or Black Diasporic Literature; experience with network modeling, GIS, and computational text analysis. 

Saint Louis Integrated Database of Enslavement (SLIDE) is seeking an RA to contribute to the Saint Louis Integrated Database of Enslavement (SLIDE), a website that aggregates historical records about enslavement and enslaved people across Greater St. Louis in one searchable database. RAs will assist in editing and standardizing existing data within the database, and create new datasets from historical records such as the Federal Census Mortality Schedules for St. Louis or Freedom Suits filed by people held in bondage in St. Louis. RAs will commit 4-6 hours per week contributing to the database and participating in occasional meetings with the PI. Necessary skills: familiarity with .csv (excel) spreadsheets; attention to detail. Desirable skills: familiarity with basic coding; ability to read (19th century) cursive;  general knowledge of the history of slavery in the U.S., particularly St. Louis. 

This project considers how Americans attempted to distribute appointed power from above in an age when Americans were struggling to create a government where power flowed from below. To support these questions about the implementation of federal power in the early republic, the project is compiling exhaustive data on the making of federal appointments. Using the Senate Executive Journal (transcribed by Library of Congress's American Memory project) as sources, we are building a database of federal appointments. Because this data can support more questions than CFG is presently asking, part of the goal of the project is a kind of data reuse effort: thus, in addition to a book by the project Director, another main product will be a publicly accessible scholarly resource which will present the aforementioned data as well as GIS-enabled visualizations and encoded texts. 

Early Print Lab is developing a range of tools for the computational exploration and analysis of English print culture before 1700. It includes a set of visualizations of the EEBO-TCP as a collection of publications, as well as a historical N-gram browser and a reporting tool for Key Words in Context. We are currently investigating problems in poetics, early technology, and the history of ideas. Visithttps://earlyprint.org/lab/ for more information. 

The Gender Violence Database is an accessible searchable tool designed for researchers, practitioners, and the general public interested in the multidisciplinary field of Violence Against Women. Applicants with NGO experience, specialized training (SARAH, Uncle Joe’s, etc.), or coursework related to these topics are preferred. No prior computer skills are necessary (though they are welcome). Visit the Gender Violence Database project page for more information.

This project employs the techniques of probabilistic topic modeling to test a set of longstanding assumptions about the periodization of German literary history.

The professor and five editors are producing the Complete Works of Edmund Spenser for Oxford UP. The work is being developed as an electronic edition, from which two print versions, and an online archive will be generated. Student RAs do a wide range of research depending on the tasks at hand, ranging from pure research projects, to proofreading the edited text against original witnesses, to writing software to process images and texts. RAs work five hours a week and attend a weekly project meeting. Visit the Spenser Archive for more information.

The faculty, students, and staff involved in this project are producing a database that will chart changes in poetic form and musical performance in the comedies and tragedies of ancient Greece. RAs will learn various ways of producing machine-readable texts and making them useable for research.