Stanford Undergraduate Fellowships

• Eligibility[+]
  Undergraduates writing honors theses, students who intend to write honors theses, and/or students who are interested in pursuing research beyond their course requirements would be good candidates to apply for these fellowships. Ideally, undergraduate fellows are majoring in a humanities department. However, the program may also include majors from any department as long as they are working on a humanities-related project. Each Humanities Center Fellow may only sponsor one undergraduate fellow.
• Stipends[+]
  Undergraduate fellows receive a stipend of $1,400 per quarter; they are expected to perform up to 10 hours per week of research work for the Humanities Center Fellow. No course credit is allowed for work done as part of this fellowship.
• Application Process[+]
  Undergraduate applicants must identify a faculty member from the list below with whom they would be interested to work. Students should contact the fellow directly to discuss the possibility of a collaboration. Once participating fellows have chosen an undergraduate research assistant, the completed and signed application form should be submitted to the Fellowship Program Manager.  The application form is available as a pdf by clicking on the "Apply Now" link on this page.  
  
  Please visit the People-Fellows section to read full biographies of each of our fellows. The fellows listed below are interested in working with undergraduate students.
  
  Shahzad Bashir
  
  
  In my project, "Persianate Pasts: Memory, Narration, and Ideology in the Islamic East, 1400-1600," I seek to understand the past as an aspect of the social imagination of Persianate Islamic societies during the period 1400-1600. Focusing on themes such as calendars, the principle of lineage, the use of poetry in relating the past, and the use of first person voice, I aim to write a cultural history culled from reflecting on a combination of epistemological, sociohistorical, and aesthetic issues.
  
  
  Margaret Cohen
  
  
  "Enchanted Depths" examines a profound shift in the Western cultural imagination of the ocean resulting from technologies permitting visualization of the underwater environment, in a history dating to the middle of the 19th century, which has continued to unfold to the present day.
  
  I would be interested in working with a student to go through periodicals and look at the popular reception of pioneering oceanographic expeditions, starting with the HMS Challenger, 1872-1876. The periodicals could be anglophone, also French, German, depending on the languages spoken by the student.
  
  
  
  Leah DeVun
  
  
  “Enter Sex” explores how medieval and early modern scientists, lawyers, theologians and others have understood people with atypical sex anatomies, known during the period as hermaphrodites. The medical treatment of atypical sex – now called intersex or disorders of sex development (DSD) – is currently the source of fierce debate in the United States and Europe; while it offers no simple equations between medieval hermaphrodites and modern intersex people, this study argues that we cannot fully appreciate modern conceptions of sex difference without understanding the genesis and history of such conceptions.
  
  
  
  Paula Findlen
  
  
  I am interested in finding a student to work on analysis of Galileo's correspondence and publication records. More generally, the student could assist me in my research on knowledge, communications, and information networks during the Scientific Revolution, which could potentially involve work on mapping some of the interesting data we find. Ideally the student will be interested in one or more of the following: Italian history and culture; the early history of science and medicine; history of collecting.
  
  
  
  David Gilmartin
  
  
  My project at the Center this year is entitle, “The People’s Sovereignty: Law, Politics and Elections in the Making of Modern India.” The project focuses in particular on the evolution of the law relating to elections in India, from the early 20th century to the present, and on what this tells us about the institutional and intellectual foundations of democracy in India. As a historian, I am particularly interested in understanding critical changes across this period. I would be interested in working with a student who wanted to explore and research any aspect of this topic, from the conduct of elections, to changing frameworks of constitutional law, to the changing powers of the National Election Commission, to the popular discourse on electoral corruption and its meanings.
  
  
  Kristen Haring
  
  
  Early users of the telephone felt it was unnatural to talk to someone they couldn’t see. I am investigating the set of design strategies that eased (without ever fully eliminating) callers’ discomfort with the telephone. Because this is a project about the cultural acceptance of a technology, the research involves a fascinating mixture of sources — from novels, movies, and advertisements on the cultural end of the spectrum, to architectural blueprints, scientific articles, and communications policy on the technical end. My questions are largely historical, examining more than a hundred years of telephone use in the United States, however, I will bring the study up to the present time. For example, one topic an Undergraduate Research Assistant might address would be the many forms of “texting” practiced during the twentieth century. SMS may be relatively new, but your great-grandmother sent text by telephone.
  
  
  Debora Silverman
  
  
  My project "Art of Darkness: Art Nouveau, ‘Style Congo’ and the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa," explores the legacy of King Leopold II in the Tervuren museum and its core collections. The project identifies for the first time the origins of Belgian Art Nouveau as a specifically Congo nature style and as imperial modernism by focusing closely on the two leading figures of Belgian design reform, Henry van de Velde and Victor Horta; it suggests how stylistic forms of modernism expressed a displaced encounter with a distant, but encroaching, imperial violence.
  
  I would like to find a research assistant proficient in web photoshop and image management ideas and library and clerical work for book manuscript preparation. Basic Word skills. A student from art history or film or visual culture studies or cultural history might be of particular interest.
  
  
  
  Malcolm Turvey
  
  
  "Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comic Modernism" will offer a comprehensive analysis of filmmaker Jacques Tati's highly original and challenging aesthetic, which he cultivated in response to problems of modern life, principally alienation.
  
  A research assistant with proficiency in French is of particular interest - it would be a great help to have someone who can read through and write reports about some of the mountain of French material about Tati. Also useful would be students with an interest in film and modernism.