Beth Mardutho Summer Fellowships

Each summer, Beth Mardutho offers several Fellowships in the Digital Humanities. These provide opportunities for select graduate students, early career scholars, and, on occasion, advanced undergraduates to work on Syriac Digital Humanities projects under the guidance of lead scholars and researchers. Fellowships are designed for full-time (40 hours/week) research over a 12-week summer. Thus, fellows are expected to reduce outside work, research, and responsibilities for the duration of their fellowship. Fellows may arrange their start and end dates as convenient and may work remotely, but must commit to three months' work on their fellowship project(s).

Fellowships are not an employment opportunity, but are designed primarily for learning new skills in the Digital Humanities through working on DH projects. In past years, fellows have developed Syriac OCR models for manuscripts (Qoruyo); created Simtho, a philologically-based online corpus of Syriac texts; TEI/XML-encoded issues of Hugoye; worked on the eBethArké online library; compiled data for part-of-speech tagging; and tagged lexical data for SEDRA, our online searchable lexicons, among other projects. Several fellows have published articles on their findings.

Each fellowship has different compensation terms. Most include a stipend for travel or housing, free admission to Beth Mardutho's Syriac II summer course, and a book grant from Gorgias Press. Fellows may choose to complete their fellowship at the Institute or, if travel is prohibitive, remotely from their current institution, provided they are available during the term of the fellowship.

How to apply

Applicants must have had at least one year of university-level Syriac and be enrolled in or recently graduated from a graduate program. Non-academic candidates from within the Syriac heritage tradition who know Classical Syriac are also encouraged to apply. Interested candidates should send a cover letter and a CV to fellowships@bethmardutho.org.

Named fellowships

The following positions are available each summer:

The Edward Y. Hannoush Memorial Fellowship in the Digital Humanities, sponsored by Dr. Peter and Dr. Gretchen Hannoush

The Dr. Nebil and Mrs. Jennifer Aydin Fellowship

The Herman & Mary K. Seibel Fellowship in the Syriac Digital Humanities

The Seibel Fellowship invites graduate students and recent graduates to work on the Institute's initiative to build a philologically-motivated text corpus and to expand the linguistic features of the Syriac Electronic Data Research Archive (SEDRA), learning best practices in the Digital Humanities along the way. Candidates must have excellent knowledge of Syriac (especially morphology) and be enrolled in a graduate program (Master or PhD) or be recent graduates; non-academic candidates from within the Syriac-using tradition who know Classical Syriac very well are also encouraged to apply and will be introduced to the world of Syriac academia. The successful candidate receives a stipend towards accommodation, travel, or living expenses, a book grant from Gorgias, and free admission to the summer Syriac II course, and is named The Herman & Mary K. Seibel Fellow in the Digital Humanities.

The Dayroyo Elio Atto Fellowship in Digital Humanities

This fellowship is funded through the sale of a limited-edition Gospel Lectionary gifted to the Institute by master calligrapher Dayroyo Elio Atto, Abbot of St. Ephrem Monastery in Holland. Proceeds provide developing scholars and graduate students the opportunity to dedicate twelve weeks at Beth Mardutho over the summer.

Endow a fellowship

To become a fellowship benefactor, please email fellowships@bethmardutho.org, and we will contact you with additional information. You may also use the link below to submit a contribution — choose an annual ($2,500/year) or monthly ($210/month) plan and name your fellowship on the payment page.

Internships

Beth Mardutho is an approved Field Education site for Princeton Theological Seminary. Select seminarians may undertake digital humanities internships for both summer and academic-year placements to fulfill degree requirements. Interns work on a variety of DH projects from scanning the research library, to cataloging, to TEI/XML encoding journal articles, and more. In weekly seminars they learn about Syriac Christianity past and present, encounter the Syriac liturgy, and explore academic careers. Interested students should contact Beth Mardutho in winter or early spring for summer internships.

Past fellows and interns

Meet the fellows and interns who have worked with us since 2018 on our Past Fellows & Interns page.