photo by Courtney Vogel, © Longwood University
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, who holds a PhD in American studies from Michigan State University, 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.
“I look forward to joining the ARL staff and working on this initiative,” Mulligan said. “This appointment gives me the chance to help foster open and equitable access to information and research, collaboration between higher education institutions and publishers, and revision of the process and forms of publishing to meet the demands of an increasingly digitized marketplace.”
ARL executive director Elliott Shore said, “We are delighted to welcome Rikk Mulligan to ARL in this new position. He brings both experience and enthusiasm for this portfolio and we look forward to the contribution we know he will make to this issue of tremendous importance to the academy. We deeply appreciate the great opportunity that the support from ACLS provided in order for this position to be developed.”
Starting in July, Mulligan may be reached at rikk@arl.org.
ARL was selected in January to be a host organization 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 organizations in government and the nonprofit sector. The program is made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information about the program and the 2014 fellows, visit the ACLS Public Fellows website.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. ARL’s mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at https://www.arl.org/.
