Position Announcement: Curator, Anthropology (Linguist)

[Robert Leopold]

Department of Anthropology
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
 
The Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian¹s National Museum of
Natural History is seeking a curator to develop and lead an endangered
language program that will engage in research, documentation and
preservation. Community engagement will be a major component of this
position. In addition to conducting research, both in the field and drawing
upon archival collections, the curator will develop strong interactions with
communities faced with language loss while also addressing major research
themes within linguistics and anthropology.
 
This curator will join a large and diverse department, currently with 72
full-time staff members, including 17 curators. The Department is organized
into three research divisions: archaeology, physical anthropology and
ethnology, along with Collections Management, the National Anthropological
Archives, the Human Studies Film Archives, and the Repatriation Office.
There are a number of programs within the three research divisions,
including the PaleoIndian Program, the Asian Cultural Heritage Program, the
Archaeobiology Program and the Arctic Studies Center. Some of the current
research in the Department centers on humankind¹s earliest beginnings, the
domestication of plants and animals, the rise of state-level societies,
expressive culture in Africa and Polynesia, North American ethnohistory,
circumpolar ethnology and the human dimensions of global climate change.
Several staff hold teaching appointments as adjunct faculty with area
universities. The Anthropology collections hold over 2.3 million
archaeological objects and over 200,000 ethnology objects, more than 9,000
linear feet of archival documents and 8 million running feet of film and
video. The Department¹s webpage can be viewed at
http://www.nmnh.si.edu/anthro/

The successful candidate will need to combine skills in field- and
collections-based research, outreach and public programming, and experience
securing external funding. This position will be offered as a four-year
Federal term position, which may be converted to permanent. The four-year
term position is comparable to tenure-track positions. U.S. citizenship is
required.
 
The official position announcment is available here:
08-NG-293573-DEU-NMNH Anthropologist (Linguist) GS-0190-12 DC
http://www.sihr.si.edu/vac/08-NG-293573-DEU-NMNH.pdf