Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship

Description

 The Lewis & Ruth Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship, located in Mills Memorial Library at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, invites qualified candidates to apply for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship.

Job Title: Postdoctoral Fellowship
Posting Date: May 30, 2014
Application Deadline: June 30, 2014
Position Start Date: September 2, 2014
Position End Date: August 31, 2016
Supervisor: Dr. Sandra Lapointe
Remuneration: $45,000/year
This position is included within the Canadian Union of Public Employees (“CUPE”) Local 3906 Unit 3, representing Post-Doctoral Fellows.

Background

The Sherman Centre increasingly engages in a wide range of activities that support and build the McMaster digital humanities (DH) community. A critical need that has become apparent in the course of this work is the inclusion of DH skill instruction, methodology, and theory in the curriculum, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. From the vantage point of the Sherman Centre, we see this as the beginning of a clear trend toward increased interest in introducing students to text mining, data analytics, and GIS and, in general, increasing their technical fluency and competency.

General scope

Working under the leadership of Professor Sandra Lapointe (Philosophy – also Academic Director of the Sherman Centre) and Dale Askey (Administrative Director of the Sherman Centre), the postdoctoral fellow will begin to address substantively this emerging demand for DH integration into the curriculum. In alignment with their own DH research agenda, the fellow will, in close collaboration with other Sherman Centre staff:

assess faculty interests, needs, and goals with regard to DH curriculum
offer consulting to faculty and graduate students to enable them to begin to include DH elements in their courses
create multimedia content–primarily video–that offers short and focused introductions to basic concepts and skills
engage library staff in other functional areas to draw their expertise into the DH space and connect them to faculty who need support
support the further development of the Sherman Centre makerspace
connect with other nascent digital humanities initiatives in the region.
Beyond these activities, the fellow will participate in the life and activities of the Sherman Centre and represent it at key DH events such as the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) and the annual Digital Humanities conference (at the institution’s expense).

Qualifications

Candidates must be recent Ph.D. recipients in the humanities (degree date 2011 or later) with an established digital humanities research agenda. The Ph.D. is the only eligible degree and must be in hand by September 1, 2014. The optimal candidate will have a Ph.D. in a discipline represented amongst McMaster’s graduate programs, although applications from any humanities discipline will be accepted. Demonstrated skills in areas such as data visualization, coding, text analysis, or GIS are highly desired. International scholars are invited to apply, however preference will be given to Canadian citizens and permanent residents.

How to apply

Please forward a CV, cover letter, names and contact information for three references, and a sample/portfolio of DH project work to Chris Nicol, HR Coordinator. Please contact Dale Askey or Sandra Lapointe if you have general questions about the position.

McMaster University is strongly committed to employment equity within its community, and to recruiting a diverse faculty and staff. The University encourages applications from all qualified candidates, including women, members of visible minorities, Aboriginal persons, members of sexual minorities and persons with disabilities.