Assistant Editor

Job Description:

Brown University Library seeks to hire a creative, highly organized, and enthusiastic individual for the position of Assistant Editor, Brown University Digital Publications. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown University Digital Publications — launched with generous support from the Mellon Foundation with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities — is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age. This is an exciting opportunity to join an innovative, expanding program committed to integrating diversity, equity, and social justice into the practice and production of digital publications for both scholarly audiences and the wider public. Landmark publications include Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020), recipient of the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History by the American Historical Association; Brown University’s Slavery and Justice Report with Commentary on Context and Impact (2021); Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World (Stanford University Press, 2022); A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022); and the 13-volume series Race & … in America. Thirteen other works are currently in development and represent a broad disciplinary range. BUDP also partners with the MIT Press to produce On Seeing, a multimodal book series exploring understudied questions at the intersection of visual culture and subjects such as race, care, decolonization, privilege, and precarity.

The Assistant Editor will work as part of a multi-skilled team of experts to develop complex born-digital scholarship intended for publication with leading academic presses. In close collaboration with the Director, the Assistant Editor will play a key role in supporting humanities scholars in the creation of new scholarly forms that present research and advance arguments in ways not achievable in a conventional print format, whether through multimedia enhancements or interactive engagement with research materials. The Assistant Editor will help conceptualize, research, and administer multimodal monograph projects by building rapport and working effectively with a wide range of collaborators, including but not limited to Brown faculty researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, designers and technological developers, and university press staff. The Assistant Editor will contribute to the acquisitions process, undertake developmental editing, and copyediting as needed, manage timelines and budgets, and assist in the preparation of archival and multimedia assets for individual projects while working on multiple projects simultaneously. The Assistant Editor will take a proactive, critically engaged approach to digital content development, continuously looking for ways to support underrepresented voices and perspectives. The Assistant Editor will help administer national training workshops such as Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing: Resources and Roadmaps, an NEH Institute on Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities; and will participate in relevant meetings and events across and beyond the Brown campus.

The Assistant Editor will report to the Director of Brown University Digital Publications, part of Brown’s Center for Digital Scholarship at the Universi