An Everyday Jihad is a faculty-led research apprenticeship centered on a rare archive of nearly 2,000 Islamic legal opinions produced by a major Jihadi-Salafi website between 2009 and 2015. Student researchers will learn how scholars work with large textual archives by exploring a searchable English-language database of translated fatwas, developing analytical categories, evaluating patterns of legal reasoning, and investigating questions about law, ethics, violence, and everyday life—from war and politics to marriage, mortgages, music, clothing, and prayer. The apprenticeship offers sustained experience in research design, textual analysis, and the study of contemporary Islam. Ideal participants are high-achieving, independent students interested in Middle Eastern, Islamic, international, or religious studies. Arabic is helpful but not required.
I seek an undergraduate Research Apprentice to assist with my current book project, Outcast: Irishfacing and Blackface Performance in Twentieth-Century Theatre. “Outcast” actors were perceived as ethnic and racial outsiders in real life, but they also had a role in “casting out” nefarious casting practices in productions from The Emperor Jones (1920) to Hamilton (2015).
The ideal candidate will have an interest in performance, theatre, or literary studies, history, and enjoy finding answers to unknown information. S/he needs to be able to conduct research (including archival research), write clearly and compellingly, have a keen editorial eye, and be organized and self-driven.
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The student apprentice will catalog and describe documents from the archives of the British Foreign Office in the British National Archives and the Archbishop of Canterbury from the Lambeth Palace Archive from digital photographs of those documents. These archival documents document how the British Foreign Office and the Anglican Church closely followed Soviet persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1920s and decided when and how to intervene on its behalf. Knowledge of Russian is desirable but not necessary. The apprentice will gain the experience of working with archival documents and learning how historians conduct primary research.
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The student research apprentice will assist with one or more of the following: identification, analysis, and coding of selected coaching and feminist leadership websites; identification and coding of representations of women in leadership, feminist leadership, and feminist coaching in social media platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram; annotations of peer-reviewed sources; assistance with coding of de-identified interview transcripts; and/or data entry to organize research materials. The student can be from any major, and should have strong analytical and writing skills. Interest in women’s and gender studies, leadership studies, and interdisciplinary qualitative research is a plus.
POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED