Digital Humanities Program Intern

Overview of ACLS

Formed a century ago, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is a nonprofit federation of 81 scholarly organizations. As the leading representative of American scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, ACLS’s core principle is that knowledge is a public good. As such, ACLS strives to promote the circulation of humanistic knowledge throughout society. In addition to stewarding and representing its member organizations, ACLS employs its endowment and $34 million annual operating budget to support scholarship in the humanities and social sciences and to advocate for its central role in the twenty-first century.

Job Summary

Reporting to the Senior Program Officer of Intentional Design for an Equitable Academy (IDEA) and working closely with IDEA program and Communications staff, this internship will provide programmatic support to the 2025-26 competition of the ACLS Digital Justice Grant program, which supports digital projects across the humanities and interpretative social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods. The IDEA Digital Humanities intern will support the program’s fall webinar series through direct engagement with digital humanities interlocutors; compile and analyze relevant program data, while drafting summary notes; and process submitted applications, under the supervision of the IDEA Senior Program Officer.

The Digital Humanities program intern will expand their scholarly network in digital humanities, as well as gain concrete experience in program strategy, design, outreach, and assessment.

This role is a remote position that requires no more than 20 hours per week with flexible work hours. The pay rate for this position is $30/hour for a term of 15 weeks starting in September.

Overview of Department

The Intentional Design for an Equitable Academy (IDEA) unit draws on human-centered design as a methodology for developing activities and convenings where we can re-envision academia’s culture, policies, and practices. Led by the IDEA Director, the unit includes the Intention Foundry (IF), the ACLS Digital Justice Grant Program, and the Leadership Institute for a New Academy (LINA). ACLS takes this moment as a call for cultivating opportunities for reparative intervention and transformative engagement that further ACLS efforts to enhance equity, justice, and well-being for scholars within and beyond the academy.

The core aims of IDEA include:

• Curating and facilitating forums for collaborative visioning and planning that bridge groups across the higher education ecosystem.
• Developing curriculum & experiential opportunities for re-envisioning key power systems, taking deep dives into challenging issues, and strategizing for substantive change.
• Designing initiatives that strive to alter the status quo of systems in academia, while working to support the most vulnerable in navigating systems as they currently exist.
• Establishing new partnerships to engage constituencies (particularly those facing underinvestment in the academy) in people-centered equity-advancing efforts.

Responsibilities

• Prepare materials for Fall outreach webinar series, including attending pre-session meetings with invited interlocutors, taking notes during those meetings, and drafting discussion points and questions for public webinars
• Video edit materials from webinars for public consumption, cleaning up transcripts, managing supplementary materials webpage
• Collect survey data from prospective applicants, interlocutors, and reviewers
• Draft summary notes about various program components for assessment and evaluation
• Process submitted applications after competition deadline under supervision of Senior Program Officer

Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in, or a recent graduate of (within the past 2 years), a graduate program (e.g. MA, PhD, MLIS) with a concentration or focus in digital humanities
• Working knowledge of digital humanities methods and tools, as well as familiarity with scholarly projects, debates, and conversations within the digital humanities ecosystem
• Excellent oral and written communication skills
• Qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis
• Proficiency with WordPress, Excel, Microsoft Office Suite, Canva

Preferred Skills

• Ability to exercise deep empathy, compassion, and understanding alongside an ethics of care
• Demonstrated commitment to and engagement with justice, equity, and well-being initiatives and efforts
• Ability to work collaboratively, as well as independently
• Highly organized, detail-oriented with ability to manage priorities and meet deadlines