CURATORS DISTINGUISHED PROFESS - Virginia Blanton
Virginia Blantonblantonv@umkc.edu
I am a co-investigator on an international digital humanities project, which is funded by the Canadian government. The project, Cantorales in the Americas and Beyond, seeks to identify handwritten choir books (often called Gregorian chant—think monks and nuns singing) that were made in Spain or Portugal but are now in North, Central, and South America. We are currently focused on manuscripts in North America but will also begin work on materials in other regions. Essentially, this is a project that is building a large dataset of information about medieval and early modern manuscripts that will be archived in an online repository and used by musicologists all over the world. You would be responsible for maintaining a social media presence about the project, emailing with archivists and project partners, collecting data about manuscripts, managing that data, and identifying new areas of investigation.
Ideal majors are those in English, Spanish, history, art and art history, musicology, as well as those interested in the book arts, such as graphic design students. Those interested in working in an archive or working with cultural heritage documents will really enjoy this project, as would students who work in managing data. You will be most successful if you are a good researcher, curious, detail-oriented, and self-directed. Speaking, reading, and writing in Spanish is a big plus.
You will get to work a major grant-funded project, contribute data to an important digital resource for musicologists, and polish your skills in communicating with archivists, scholars, and data managers. You will build excellent skills cataloging and managing large files of data. After being trained in our goals and standard operations protocols, you will meet with me weekly, sharing your results and providing insights on how we move forward. There will be occasional meetings with the international team who work on this project, who include scholars from Spain, Colombia, Australia, and Canada.
You will work 10 hours per week. Team meetings will generally be on Wednesday afternoons. Some are in-person; some are remote.
Mostly remote work.
Prefer junior-level standing or above.
The grant runs through May of 2027.
Some undergraduate researchers are hired through the work-study program; others are hired through the Mellon Humanities Internship Program.
archival work on manuscripts; data collection; data inputting; social media posts
Sep 23, 2025
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