Atla’s research tools rely on the applied expertise of Atla’s team of metadata editors and analysts who synthesize research from a wide range of academic resources and make decisions about the most relevant subjects to include in the records in our databases to support discovery by our community of researchers and students. Metadata Editors like Nina Shultz, who has been with Atla since 1997 and whose experience and expertise are unique to the world of theological and religious research.
Nina spent her early childhood in the Monterey Bay area on the central coast of California. Her family relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area while she was in elementary school. When she was a teenager, her family moved to southeastern England for three years. Nina describes this as a formative time that provided a marvelous cross-cultural experience, which included getting to know her classmates from English, Irish, and other international backgrounds. She also benefited from the British secondary school system, where her intensive and wide-ranging education included an emphasis on foreign languages, as well as physical and social sciences, literature, musicology, and home economics.
Nina returned to the Bay Area and remained there for her first two years of college, studying at a small school near her hometown. She then transferred to the University of California, Irvine, where she completed her undergraduate degree in Anthropology. She continued to study Anthropology at the graduate level, earning her Master of Arts degree at the University of Texas in Austin, focused on the study of indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America. She then went to the University of Chicago Divinity School, where she earned a second Master of Arts in Religious Studies, studying Orthodox Christianity first in the context of the peoples of the Republic of Georgia and later that of the United States. During the time she was pursuing her first two master’s degrees, she spent summers enrolled in an immersive graduate program in Russian language and literature at Norwich University near Montpelier, Vermont, which culminated in a third Master of Arts degree.
In June of 1997, Nina applied for the position of editor, the only open position with Atla at that time. She felt her religious studies background and foreign language expertise would make her a strong fit for the indexing staff. She was offered and accepted a position as an Indexer Analyst, where she learned the art of indexing from Editor R. Dean (Ric) Hudgens, Editor and later Manager of Bibliographic Control Erica Treesh, and fellow Indexer Analyst Lowell K. Handy.
At the time, Atla operated under a smaller staff of indexers, and each analyst was required to be a generalist, working on whatever material was on hand. In recent years, with the number of staff in the department expanding, those who work as metadata analysts and editors can now mostly work on material within their own expertise. In Nina’s case, this includes titles related to social sciences, anthropology, indigenous studies, and Orthodox Christianity. She also indexes materials related to Historic Peace Churches (Mennonites, Anabaptists, Brethren churches) and Latter-Day Saints-related material, gaining expertise on these subjects in her early years as an Indexer. She has indexed journals and essay collections in English, Romance languages, Slavic languages, and German.
When asked what role she believes Atla fills in the religion and theology space, she notes, “Scholars of my acquaintance, including anthropologists, sociologists, musicologists, historians, value Atla for the broad topical, geographic, and linguistic range of journals that it makes available through its bibliographic records and full-text offerings.”
Related to her work at Atla, Nina continues to engage in the study of indigenous peoples, with a particular focus on Orthodox Alaskans (specifically the Yup’ik), their indigenous knowledge, liturgical life, and ethics. She presents her work in this field at conferences of academic societies, including the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Alaska Anthropological Association, the Association for the Study of Eastern Christian History and Culture, the International Society of Orthodox Church Music, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. In her free time, Nina enjoys choral singing of classical, liturgical, and contemporary repertoire, particularly a cappella, and in October 2023 will be part of a choir singing the premiere of a setting of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom to the melodies of African American spirituals.
We asked Nina to highlight some recent titles she has worked on for Atla’s research tools, and she shared the following:
Anthropos, a semiannual journal, has been published since 1906 by Anthropos Institut St. Augustin. The journal publishes academic articles, review articles, commentaries, or shorter reflections on current issues of import to cultural anthropologists, book reviews, book lists, lists of articles in other publications of interest to readers of this journal. Topics include indigenous communities, anthropology of religious rituals, everyday practice, myth, philosophy and methodology in anthropology, religious material culture, and the arts in religion. Contributions are in a range of languages, including English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. Indexed in Atla Religion Database®.
Orientalia Christiana Periodica has been published since 1935 by the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome. It is an academic title on various aspects of the Eastern Christian Churches, including manuscript studies, liturgy, history, linguistic studies, history of Biblical interpretation, monasticism, and church music. The journal publishes contributions in mainly Western and occasionally Slavic languages but also regularly includes historical texts and references in Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, and Syriac. Indexed in Atla Religion Database.
Dumbarton Oaks Papers has been published by the Dumbarton Oaks Library and Research Collection annually since 1941. This English-language journal covers various aspects of life in Byzantium, including archaeology, architecture, art, church history, interreligious relations, religious minorities, literature, music, numismatics, and paleography. The journal publishes the proceedings of many of the annual conferences on Byzantine studies at Dumbarton Oaks and reports from archaeological expeditions in the region of Byzantium. Indexed in Atla Religion Database.
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