The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has named Rikk Mulligan program officer for scholarly publishing, effective July 14, 2014. His two-year fellowship position has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) through their Public Fellows Program.
In this position, Mulligan will work with a joint task force of ARL and the Association of American Universities (AAU) to promote the use of the enhanced capabilities of digital technology to move the academy towards new, sustainable, affordable, innovative forms of scholarship. He will assist the initiation and development of the ARL/AAU task force work within ARL member libraries and facilitate the task force’s consultations with key sectors of higher education. Mulligan will also work on other collaborative scholarly communication activities with the academy.
Mulligan brings to ARL a strong background in both publishing and technology. His research is interdisciplinary and he is an author in the area of popular culture. Through his scholarly and professional work, he has been encouraging the move of research and scholarship to an online environment. Mulligan currently serves on editorial boards or reviews for Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Digital Humanities Now, and the Journal of Popular Culture. For the past three years he has served as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Longwood University.
ARL was selected in January to be a host organisation for the ACLS Public Fellows Program, a career-building fellowship initiative designed to expand the reach of doctoral education in the humanities. In 2014, 20 recent PhDs from the humanities and humanistic social sciences are being placed in two-year staff positions at partnering organisations in government and the non-profit sector. The program is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
