Mission.
Scholiad is a search, matching, and discovery platform built for humanities and social-science scholars. It aggregates academic positions, fellowships, named lectureships, funding competitions, postdoctoral programs, and visiting appointments — the full range of opportunities that structure a scholarly career — and surfaces them against a researcher's specific profile and interests.
The disciplinary boundary is the product, not a limitation of it.
General-purpose academic job boards are organized around the majority of their users, which means the humanities and social sciences are served as an afterthought to a larger whole. Scholiad is built from the opposite direction: the field defines the scope, and every part of the platform — the sources it watches, the way it reads a listing, the logic that scores a match — is calibrated to how humanities and social-science careers actually develop.
What the platform does.
Scholiad runs a continuously updated catalog of sources: disciplinary societies, departmental postings, funder listings, and association calendars across the humanities and social sciences. The platform aggregates these into a single, searched and filtered surface — so the work of monitoring dozens of separate sites is done once, centrally, rather than once per researcher, repeatedly.
When a researcher builds a profile — discipline, subfield, methods, career stage, geographic constraints — the platform scores each new listing against that profile and surfaces a reason for every match it recommends. This is not a keyword filter dressed up in different language. A medievalist and a political scientist who share a keyword will not receive the same results.
Alerts are delivered on a digest cadence — up to weekly for Plus subscribers, up to daily for Premium — so the platform fits the rhythm of a research week rather than interrupting it. The core catalog, search, and browse are free: keeping discovery open to every scholar is a founding policy of the platform, not a temporary promotion.
Principles.
The humanities and social-science scope is not a phase we expect to grow out of. We do not aggregate STEM postings, professional schools, or business-school positions, and we do not intend to. The disciplinary boundary is the product, not a temporary limit on it. Future editions, if any, will be shaped to their own field rather than dissolved into a generic feed.
User data is encrypted at rest. We do not sell user data, profile information, or search behavior to third parties, and we do not run advertising. Usage telemetry, where collected, is anonymized and used only to keep the platform working — never sold, never linked to your account for marketing. When you use the AI-assisted feedback tools, your surname is removed from the text before it is sent to the AI provider; your first name is kept, and your stored document is left exactly as you wrote it. Your documents are not used by Scholiad to train AI models, and we contract only with AI providers whose terms prohibit training on the content we send them. Scholiad is funded entirely by subscription revenue from the people who use it, and that funding model is why the privacy posture is a starting point rather than something negotiated away.
Scholiad is independently funded and operated. We are not a venture-backed growth company, and we are not owned by a publisher, university press, learned society, or job-board conglomerate. We make product decisions on the timeline that serves humanities scholars — fellowship cycles, association calendars, the slow rhythms of archival research. Institutions that contract with Scholiad contract with the team that built it, not with an intermediary.
AI feedback, not AI authorship.
Scholiad includes AI-assisted tools for reviewing application materials — cover letters, research statements, and CVs. These tools operate on a single, non-negotiable principle: the researcher authors the work; the platform helps them examine it. A user submits their own draft; the platform returns structural feedback — coherence, clarity, alignment with the opportunity — the same kind of review a writing-center advisor or a trusted colleague would provide. The platform does not generate application text, does not auto-complete statements of purpose, and does not produce materials on a researcher's behalf.
This distinction matters for institutional contexts. The AI feedback feature is built to be auditable: your original draft and the structural feedback the platform returned are both retained, and when you submit a revised draft, that revision is kept alongside them. What the record makes visible is a researcher engaging seriously with their own work — not outsourcing it. For institutions whose academic-integrity policies govern AI-assisted writing, that trail is evidence of genuine engagement, not a way around it.
Before any document reaches the AI review layer, your surname is removed from the copy that is sent; your first name stays, and the document you keep on the platform is unchanged. The platform does not use your documents to train AI models.
What this platform doesn't cover.
A serious platform tells you what it is not, in the same voice it uses to tell you what it is. Some of these boundaries are deliberate and permanent; others are gaps we are actively closing. Both are written plainly.
Geographic scope.
Geographic coverage centers on North America and Europe, with continually validated additions across other regions. The source list is maintained and updated on an explicit cadence, not a marketing one.
STEM, professional schools, and K-12 are out of scope — intentionally.
The matching apparatus is shaped around humanities and social-science conventions. Adding STEM or professional-school postings would require a different platform, not a broader one. See the curation criteria for a longer note on where the line is drawn and why.
There are coverage gaps, and we want to know about them.
If a disciplinary society, funder, or departmental source you rely on is missing, write to us. Suggestions are reviewed and folded into the curation queue: [email protected].
The team.
Scholiad was built from inside the humanities and social sciences — by someone who spent application and fellowship cycles doing by hand what the platform now does automatically. The scope is narrow because the expertise behind it is narrow, and the matching apparatus reflects that specificity. It is run as an independent, boutique service: curation decisions, source additions, and institutional inquiries are handled directly, not routed through layers of staff.
Source suggestions are reviewed directly, institutional inquiries are answered directly, and every curation decision is made deliberately. There is no outsourced content moderation and no intermediary between the researchers who use the platform and the team that maintains it.
Contact.
Questions, corrections, or source suggestions: [email protected]. Email is read directly, and replies prioritize a real answer over a fast one.
Institutional inquiries — procurement, access, partnerships, or coverage requests from academic career offices — may also use the partnerships page for a structured intake.