Research Apprenticeships

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.

"Mapping Ottoman Print Culture" is an effort to digitize and map the development of print culture in the Ottoman Empire from 1726 to 1928, i.e., from the birth of state-backed printing to the death of the Arabic script under the Turkish Republic. 

R.A. needed for fall 2021 and spring and summer 2022.  Knowledge of Turkish (even at beginner level) is required. No knowledge of Arabic script is necessary.  Work schedule is flexible and RA can work from 2-6 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. 

"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.

Wretched Excess: An Augmented Reality Trip to Early MTV (formerly Big Apple 80s) is a story-based, geolocated mobile augmented reality (AR) app showcasing sites relevant to early MTV, a cable channel that used to play music videos 24/7. Wretched Excess uses AR to map the past onto the present, engaging music historiography, US cultural studies, pop culture, crowd-sourcing, and the ways in which new technologies expand immersive audience participation.

Fall 2022 Responsibilities—Television History/Cultural Studies position

• Research the spread of MTV in US cable programming and popular media via primary source archival materials
• Find, read, and write précis for relevant scholarship as directed
• Attend lab meetings and contribute creative ideas for data visualization and AR asset development
• Maintain accurate, complete citations for all materials via Zotero

Qualifications/skills— Television History/Cultural Studies position

• Interest in researching pop culture, MTV, and the 1980s/90s local music scene
• Experience conducting primary source archival research online and at institutions
• Strong organizational skills, reliability, and attention to detail
• Basic knowledge of MS Word, Google Docs, Google Sheets/Excel, and Google Drive
• Experience with Zotero (or willingness to learn quickly)
• Experience with the communication app Slack (or willingness to learn quickly)
• Interest in joining a highly collaborative, cross-disciplinary arts/technology team
• Interest in the future of live storytelling with immersive technology

Fall 2022 Responsibilities— Mobile Augmented Reality Asset Design position

• Design and create an animated volumetric capture (or photogrammetry, TBD) of a physical object for deployment to a mobile AR app
  Attend lab meetings and contribute creative ideas

Qualifications/skills—Mobile Augmented Reality Asset Design position

• Experience/ability to self-upskill on software for volumetric capture (or photogrammetry, TBD) and animation to be deployed to mobile AR
• Strong organizational skills, reliability, and attention to detail
• Experience with Slack (or willingness to learn quickly)
• Interest in joining a highly collaborative, cross-disciplinary arts/technology team
• Interest in the future of live storytelling with immersive technology

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.

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.

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.

 Principal Investigator: Peter Kastor

Creating a Federal Government explores the functional realities of governance during the early American republic.

Assistance is sought for the final stages of research on a book on computation and literary form. The RA will compile basic tables of data from scholarly articles, help track down sources, and create bibliographies. The ideal RA would have a broad interest in literary theory and scholarship and Digital Humanities. Some familiarity with MS Excel and basic library based research would be helpful. The workload should be 5-6 hours per week.

TBD

Principal Investigator: Jami Ake

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.

Assistance is needed on two projects: a study of German translations and adaptations of Jane Eyre (1848-1920), and the final development of a digital library of 19th-century German books in English translation. Most of the work will involve data-cleanup and proofreading. Prerequisite skills: at least third-semester German, the ability to play close attention to textual detail, the ability (and willingness)  to learn to read typographical characters in German blackletter (Fraktur). 3-5 hours per week (hours flexible).

Principal Investigator: Matt Erlin

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.

Adwetewa-Badu

Craver/Ward

Graebner

Hollenbaugh

Kang

Kirilloff

Kleutghen

Kuzuoglu

Ji-Eun Lee

Ma

Maragh-Lloyd

Micir

Moore

Schmidt

Sheren