We are a small, non-profit project, inviting faculty, postdocs, and PhD candidates in the social sciences and humanities to join us as researcher-collaborators.
What we are looking for is a good fit between your research and the Mira application, and depth in your area of study. Whether or not you think of yourself as technical matters far less.
You do not need to be a programmer. Comfort with computers helps, and experience with R, Python, or building websites is a plus, but so is everyday use of tools like SPSS, Atlas.ti, or NVivo. You might occasionally open a terminal, paste in a line we give you, run it, or find and copy the location of a file. You will never need to write code yourself.
As a collaborator you receive full access to the Mira application and everything it does, which includes gathering sources, reading and organising them, analysing them with a language model, and using the Writing Desk to compose your drafts. You also receive hands-on help applying for a Google Cloud research grant that pays for the computing power your work needs, including help writing the proposal. Finally, you receive a bridge to professional developer tools normally reserved for computer scientists, set up so that you can actually use them.
What we ask in return is your time and judgement as a scholar. You would use Mira in your own research and tell us honestly what works and what gets in the way. A small part of that is helping us shape the interface and the experience of using it — how the screen is laid out, and how easily you move from one step to the next. You would tell us where the wording is confusing, where a step is clumsy, what is missing, and what a researcher in your discipline genuinely needs. Your subject-area expertise guides what we build, and the research grant your application unlocks helps keep the shared infrastructure running for everyone.
The process is selective. We do our best to work with every serious applicant, but we cannot promise a place for everyone; we prioritise by research fit, alignment with the project, and the capacity we have at the time.
Applications for the first intake close on 1 December 2026, and decisions will be made by 1 January 2027.
If you just want to use the application and already have the skills you need to set it up and run it yourself, please visit the Mira for Developers page for instructions.
We welcome applicants from across the humanities and social sciences: master's and PhD students, postdocs, and faculty alike. What matters most is a demonstrable research use for Mira and a willingness to take part in developing it.
Being eligible for Google Cloud research credits, as a PhD student, postdoc, or faculty member at an accredited institution, further strengthens an application, because it helps fund the compute your work needs, but it is not a requirement. If you're not eligible, we'll still consider your application on a case-by-case basis, though you may wish to apply together with an eligible colleague.
We especially welcome projects in historical archival work, political economy, Marx scholarship, and critical colonial studies, including settler-colonial theory, decolonial theory, modernity/coloniality, and indigenous studies. Work engaging Enrique Dussel, Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Patrick Wolfe, and David Riazanov is a particular priority.
We also consider work in metatheory, discourse analysis, ethnography, history of science, anthropology, sociology, and economic history, scholarship engaging Michel Foucault and Edward Said, and adjacent work across the humanities and social sciences.
Technical experience is welcome too, though never required. We are especially glad to hear from anyone who has fine-tuned open language models, whether with methods like LoRA and QLoRA, the Hugging Face stack (Transformers, PEFT, TRL), frameworks such as Axolotl or Unsloth, or distributed training with DeepSpeed or FSDP. That maps directly onto what we are planning for Mira's own open-source model and multi-agent harness.