PART-TIME, 3 YEAR TERMED POSITION, 20 HOURS PER WEEK

Position Summary

Sounding Spirit Managing Editor (SSME) is the primary coordinator of operations and communications for the Sounding Spirit initiative (soundingspirit.org) at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (digitalscholarship.emory.edu) and a key member of the team editing and producing digital and print scholarly annotated facsimile editions of vernacular sacred American music books through the initiative.

The SSME will schedule project team meetings and facilitate communication among volume editors, editorial board members, the initiative’s ECDS-based project team, and contacts at the initiative’s publishing partner, the University of North Carolina Press. The SSME will work with the editor-in-chief to provide all necessary assistance to volume editors in their work, including ensuring the accuracy and completeness of volumes’ text and other component files of digital editions and assisting as needed with edition annotations, introductions, and other contextual material. The SSME will work with other members of the ECDS and UNC Press teams to format and provide materials to assist in the production of the initiative’s digital editions using Readux (readux.ecds.emory.edu) and print editions.

The SSME will report to ECDS’s Senior Digital Scholarship Strategist and Sounding Spirit Editor-in-Chief. This is a three-year, grant-funded, half-time appointment. The SSME may work remotely.

Required Qualifications

• Master’s degree, BA plus additional training or experience, or equivalent degree in a field related to the study of vernacular music of the southern Protestant diaspora, such as musicology, music bibliography, folklore, African American studies, Native American studies, or religious studies.

• Knowledge of and expertise in the music, print history, and cultural context of one or more of the genres at the center of the Sounding Spirit initiative: gospel, shape-note music, spirituals, and lined-out hymn singing.

• Knowledge and expertise in the editing and production of music editions, the production and curation of digital collections, or related work.

• Demonstrated project management skills with research, editing, or technical projects in an academic context.

• Strong writing, research, organizational, and communication skills.

• Initiative and ability to work independently.

• Ability to collaborate and work with a dispersed team of staff and faculty.

Preferred Qualifications

• Doctoral candidacy in a field related to the study of vernacular music of the southern Protestant diaspora, such as musicology, music bibliography, folklore, African American studies, Native American studies, or religious studies.

• Knowledge of and experience with digitization, optical character recognition, and metadata best practices.

• Experience with digital publishing or digital scholarship methods and platforms.

• Record of scholarly achievement through academic publications or presentations.

JOB DESCRIPTION: Manages the writing, editing, production and distribution of publications and periodicals for specific audiences and schools of the university. Writes and/or edits copy ensuring compliance with university editorial and visual identity standards. Researches current events and interviews sources for stories. Establishes production schedules to meet publication dates. Provides graphic design support for publication projects and monitors new developments in electronic communications, and selects visuals to accompany articles, such as photographs or illustrations, and works collaboratively with the art director, photographers, and editor to obtain or assign them as needed. Recruits and supervises freelance writers and interns. Performs related responsibilities as required.

The starting salary for this role will be $25,000.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS: A bachelor’s degree in communications, journalism or a related field AND five years of experience as an editor or an equivalent combination of directly related training and experience.

About Sounding Spirit

Sounding Spirit: Scholarly Editions from the Southern Sacred Music Diaspora will make available connected open access digital editions and companion print editions of five widely influential but currently inaccessible books of Protestant music. The intermingling of black, white, and Native American populations in the southern United States dispersed the music presented in these once-popular songbooks across the country. In critical editions richly annotated with text and multimedia, joined with in-depth introductions, Sounding Spirit engages an era of dramatic change in American religious song. Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Scholarly Editions and Translations program and published in state-of-the-art digital as well as hardcover print volumes by Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and the University of North Carolina Press, Sounding Spirit offers scholars of history, musicology, folklore, regional studies, and religious studies access to key texts and appeals to a general audience, including contemporary populations engaged in similar sacred music making.