Research Fellow at Amherst College in Amherst Campus

Job description

Amherst has taken a leadership role among highly selective liberal arts colleges and universities in successfully diversifying the racial, socio-economic, and geographic profile of its student body. The College is similarly committed to enriching its educational experience and its culture through the diversity of its faculty, administration and staff. Job Description: Amherst College invites applications for the position of Research Fellow at the Emily Dickinson Museum. The Research Fellow in Domestic Labor History is a fixed-term, 30-hour per week position. The expected salary range for this job opportunity is: $42.74 to $47.01 per hour. The salary offered will vary based on a number of factors, including but not limited to relevant education, training, and experience, tenure status, and other nondiscriminatory business considerations. Amherst College is pleased to provide a comprehensive, highly competitive benefits package that meets the needs of staff and faculty and their families. Click here for Benefits Information . The Research Fellow in Domestic Labor History will conduct original primary-source research to provide evidence for the Museum to document and interpret the domestic conditions that afforded Emily Dickinson the opportunity to compose a large body of poetic and epistolary work. Working with archival, manuscript, and material culture collections, the Fellow will examine records including correspondence, financial documents, census data, maps, employment records, newspapers, church records, artifacts, landscapes, the built environment, and other contemporaneous sources to identify and reconstruct the lives and labor of individual domestic workers associated with Dickinson family households and comparable homes in the region. The Fellow will investigate and analyze the social, economic, and cultural structures of nineteenth-century Amherst and New England—including systems of race, gender, class, ethnicity, immigration, and labor—that shaped the experiences, opportunities, and constraints of domestic workers. This work will situate individual biographies within broader regional contexts of domestic service, wage labor, household economies, and shifting social hierarchies. The Fellow will assess how visible and invisible labor within the home—including cooking, cleaning, laundry, caregiving, agricultural labor, animal husbandry, and other forms of household and homestead management—contributed to sustaining social, psychic, and material environments in which employers could pursue intellectual, professional, civic, and creative endeavors. The position requires critical attention to gaps and silences in the historical record and interpretive possibilities for representing individuals whose lives were often minimally documented. The Fellow will produce well-documented research findings and will work with the Senior Director of Programs to develop an interpretive framework from these findings. The Museum may incorporate research results into the visitor experience through interpretation, public programs, exhibitions, publications, and institutional scholarship, thereby advancing a fuller and more inclusive account of the historical conditions that supported Dickinson’s authorship. This position advances the institution’s commitment to inclusive, evidence-based scholarship and to expanding historical interpretation to more fully represent the lives and labor of individuals whose contributions have been understudied or marginalized in the historical record. Summary of Responsibilities: Research & Documentation Conduct rigorous primary-source research in local, regional, and national archives, including census records, employment records, correspondence, legal documents, newspapers, account books, church records, and genealogical sources. Prepare annotated bibliographies and source documentation for institutional archives. Scholarly Writing & Dissemination Identify and reconstruct biographical narratives of individual