Academic Work

Academic Work is a clean Hugo theme for researchers, academics, and technical writers. It is built for publishing papers, notes, teaching material, projects, and downloadable documents with a quiet editorial layout.

The theme includes a complete exampleSite/ so you can preview the design before using it in your own Hugo site.

Screenshots

Research	Notes	Article

Library	Projects	Theme reference

Features

• Academic sections for research, notes, library, projects, teaching, and about pages
• Responsive layout for mobile, tablet, and desktop
• Self-hosted Source Serif 4 typography
• Dark mode through prefers-color-scheme
• Accessible landmarks, skip link, keyboard focus states, and current-page navigation
• KaTeX support for inline and display math
• RSS, sitemap, robots.txt, Open Graph, Twitter Card, and JSON-LD metadata
• Tag pages and tag index
• PDF link styling with new-tab context for screen readers
• Static /search.json output for adding client-side search
• SCSS structure with aw- class prefixing

Requirements

• Hugo Extended 0.122.0 or newer

Preview The Example Site

Run this from the repository root:

hugo server --config exampleSite/hugo.toml --contentDir exampleSite/content

If you are currently inside public/, move back to the repository root first:

cd ..
hugo server --config exampleSite/hugo.toml --contentDir exampleSite/content

Installation

Add the theme as a Git submodule:

git submodule add https://github.com/sinhaparth5/academic-work themes/academic-work

Then set the theme in your site config:

theme = "academic-work"

You can also use it as a Hugo module:

[module]
  [[module.imports]]
    path = "github.com/sinhaparth5/academic-work"

Basic Configuration

See exampleSite/hugo.toml for the full demo configuration.

baseURL = "https://example.com/"
languageCode = "en"
title = "Your Name"
theme = "academic-work"
enableRobotsTXT = true
disableHugoGeneratorInject = true

[params]
  description = "Research, writing, teaching, and projects."
  author = "Your Name"
  tagline = "Department · Institution"
  email = "you@example.com"
  intro = "A short introduction shown on the home page."
  images = ["/images/cover.png"]
  math = false
  mainSections = ["research", "notes", "library", "projects"]

  [params.seo]
    siteName = "Your Name"
    twitterHandle = "@yourhandle"
    googleTagManagerID = "GTM-XXXXXXX"
    googleAnalyticsID = "G-XXXXXXXXXX"
    cookieConsentBanner = true
    cookieConsentPrivacyURL = "/privacy/"
    defaultRobots = "index,follow"
    imageWidth = 1200
    imageHeight = 630

Navigation

Edit data/navigation/main.toml:

[[items]]
name = "Research"
url = "/research/"

[[items]]
name = "Notes"
url = "/notes/"

Content Sections

Section	Archetype	Use
research	paper	Publications, preprints, talks, and working papers
notes	note	Reading notes, lecture notes, and drafts
library	library	PDFs, appendices, CVs, and datasets
projects	project	Software, experiments, and research tools
teaching	teaching	Courses, syllabi, and teaching material
about	default	Profile or biography page

Create new content with Hugo:

hugo new research/my-paper.md
hugo new notes/my-note.md
hugo new library/my-document.md
hugo new projects/my-project.md
hugo new teaching/my-course.md

Front Matter

Research page:

---
title: "Paper Title"
date: 2024-09-01
summary: "One-sentence description."
authors: ["Jane Smith", "John Doe"]
publication: "Journal or Conference"
year: 2024
tags: ["distributed systems", "consensus"]
links:
  - label: "PDF"
    url: "/files/paper.pdf"
  - label: "Code"
    url: "https://github.com/example/project"
---

Library item:

---
title: "Curriculum Vitae"
date: 2024-06-01
summary: "Current academic CV."
file: "/files/cv.pdf"
---

Math

Enable MathSnap globally with:

[params]
  math = true

Or enable it per page:

---
math: true
---

Use standard inline and display math:

Inline math uses $E = mc^2$.

$$
\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2}\,dx = \sqrt{\pi}
$$

Static Assets

Recommended paths:

static/
  favicon.ico
  files/
    paper.pdf
  images/
    cover.png
  icons/
    favicon-16x16.png
    favicon-32x32.png
    apple-touch-icon.png
    icon-192.png
    icon-512.png

Social icons used by the demo live in assets/images/socials/.

Validation

The repository includes a small validation suite:

npm run validate

It checks content front matter, local links, generated output, image attributes, JSON-LD, and search index generation.

Theme Submission

For a Hugo Themes submission, make sure these files are present:

images/screenshot.png
images/tn.png

Use the screenshots in assets/images/pics/ as the source for those final listing images.

License

MIT