POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT: CURATOR, ANTHROPOLOGY (LINGUIST)

[Robert Leopold]

Department of Anthropology
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution

The Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s 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 humankind’s 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 Department’s 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