Project Areas
Fellows bring insight, ingenuity, energy, and creativity to help us carry out both established projects and new Center initiatives. Candidates must have strong communication and writing skills and the ability to work in a dynamic environment. Fellows lead public tours of the Yiddish Book Center, generate for the Center's social media accounts, draft and publish content for the Center’s website, and support onsite educational programs. Fellows typically work in one department/project area but also interact with all Center departments on a regular basis.
2024-25 Fellowship Opportunities
Bibliography and Collections Fellowship
The bibliography and collections fellow is an integral part of the Center’s bibliography team, and through this work they will develop a rich understanding of Yiddish literature and Yiddish material and print culture. The fellow will:
- Assist in the processing of book donations, including cataloguing and sorting new items
- Support the protection and preservation of rare Yiddish books, journals, and artifacts
- Research, interpret, and create content to support the new core exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture
- Promote the rich holdings of the Center to a wider public by writing articles and blog posts for the website (and other platforms)
- Help with work on related collections, including typewriters, sheet music, archives, and wood and metal type
- Respond to inquiries about Yiddish books and process orders for them
Qualifications:
- ability to read Yiddish at an intermediate level
Digital Collections Fellowship
The digital collections fellow will work with the Center’s wide-ranging collection of unique archival materials, including video, audio, scanned books, as well as other cutting-edge projects in digital humanities, including the largest body of Yiddish books ever processed with OCR. The digital collections fellow helps develop multimedia digital humanities projects designed to make the Center’s digital holdings accessible to a wider public. Depending on the fellows’ experience, background and interests, the fellow will:
- Create curated displays of digitized archival artifacts, such as video, audio, scanned books, and archival materials
- Develop new features and code for a custom Drupal 9 website
- Assist with the development and improvement of the largest corpus of Yiddish processed with OCR
- Improve access and indexing of digital collections by creating metadata and transcriptions of archival materials
- Support efforts in digital preservation of valuable materials, including cataloging, scanning, and preservation storage infrastructure
Translation Initiative Fellowship
This fellowship supports our work to train Yiddish-to-English literary translators and to make translations of Yiddish literature broadly available through digital publications. The fellow will work as a managing editor for the publication of short works in translation on the Yiddish Book Center’s website. The fellow will also participate in workshops for our yearlong literary translation fellows and assist with inquiries from the public about translating Yiddish texts. The project will offer the fellow opportunities to develop their own skill as a literary translator and editor. With the support and supervision of the academic director, the fellow will:
- Review, edit, and prepare translations for publication on our website
- Communicate with translators about the editorial publication process
- Attend and help to coordinate three annual workshops for our Yiddish translation fellows
- Maintain our list of freelance Yiddish translators and answer public inquiries about obtaining translations from Yiddish
- Communicate with our network of Yiddish translators and assist with other events and initiatives to promote Yiddish literature in translation
Qualifications:
- ability to read Yiddish at an intermediate level
Preferred:
- demonstrated experience with literary translation through coursework, translation, editing experience, etc.