Academic is a Jekyll theme designed for academic websites that lets researchers and research groups publish their publications, courses, CV, team members, and updates as a static site on GitHub Pages.
What is Academic?
Academic is a free, open-source Jekyll theme hosted on GitHub at LeNPaul/academic. It takes content written in Markdown plus structured data in YAML files (such as _data/publications.yml and _data/settings.yml) and renders them into a static academic website. The theme runs on Jekyll, a Ruby-based static site generator, and is designed to deploy directly to GitHub Pages. It is available under the MIT License.
Key Features
- Home page layout — Displays an introduction to you or your research group, a list of featured publications, and an updates section that pulls from posts in the
_postsdirectory. - People layout — Showcases research group members with markdown pages placed in the
peopledirectory; members are defined in_data/settings.yml. - Publications layout — Lists selected or all publications from
_data/publications.yml; each entry can link directly to the paper or serve a PDF placed in thepublicationsdirectory. - Courses layout — Manages past and current courses defined in
_data/settings.yml, with markdown pages for each course in thecoursesdirectory and optional course materials in subdirectories. - CV layout — Builds a curriculum vitae from YAML files in the
_data/cvdirectory, where each section of the CV has its own YAML file. - Contact layout — Provides contact information for the research group or its leaders, defined in
_data/settings.yml. - Simple installation — Install as a Ruby gem by adding
academic-jekyll-themeto your Gemfile and settingtheme: academic-jekyll-themein_config.yml, then runbundle. - GitHub Pages ready — The theme is configured to work with Jekyll on GitHub Pages, and the author provides a tutorial on deploying Jekyll sites to GitHub Pages.
Who is it for?
Academic is built for university faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and research group leaders who need a professional academic web presence with minimal setup. A professor can showcase their lab's publications and open positions; a graduate student can host their CV and teaching materials; a research group can maintain a shared site with team member profiles and course pages.
What can you do with Academic?
- Researchers — Publish your CV, publication list with PDFs, and research updates in one place.
- Instructors — Create pages for courses you teach, including downloadable course materials.
- Research groups — Display team members, contact information, and featured publications.
- Students — Post updates for supervisors or collaborators through the built-in blog-style updates section.
How does Academic work?
Installation starts by adding the gem to your Gemfile and setting the theme in _config.yml, then running bundle. Content is managed through Markdown pages and YAML data files: you edit _data/settings.yml for people, courses, and contact info, _data/publications.yml for publications, and create markdown files in the people, courses, and publications folders. Jekyll then builds a static site locally with jekyll serve or automatically on GitHub Pages when you push the repository.
Pricing
Academic is free and open source under the MIT License.
FAQ
Is Academic free?
Yes, Academic is open source and released under the MIT License, so it is free to use, modify, and distribute.
What layouts does Academic include?
Academic includes six main layouts: home, people, publications, courses, CV, and contact. Each layout pulls content from corresponding Markdown files and YAML data files.
How do I deploy Academic on GitHub Pages?
You can deploy by following the author's tutorial at paulle.ca/jekyll-tutorials/deploy-jekyll-site-github-pages. In short, push your Jekyll site repository to GitHub and enable GitHub Pages, and the site builds automatically.
Can I use Academic for non-academic purposes?
The theme's author states you can use it for almost any other purpose as well, though it is designed with academic content in mind.
