The 2024-25 application cycle has closed. Please check back in Autumn 2025 for the 2025-26 application cycle.
The History Department is offering several paid research opportunities for Stanford undergraduates to participate in a faculty-led research project over the 2025 Winter and Spring quarters. Student research assistants (RA) will work directly with a faculty member on their current research, gaining significant experience in developing a research project, identifying and pursuing research leads, and delivering tangible, meaningful reports. RAs will meet regularly with the faculty mentor for guidance, feedback, and discussion. The research experience will culminate in a research presentation by the student and faculty at the end of the academic year. RAs will be expected to work for up to ten hours per week.
RAs do not need to be History majors, but they must have taken at least one History department course. No research experience or specialized skills are necessary unless noted in the project descriptions below.
Interested Stanford undergraduates should submit (1) a paragraph outlining their interest in participating in the program, (2) a list of History course(s) taken, and (3) a CV, indicating any background experience or language skills they may wish to highlight. Applicants may choose to indicate up to 3 projects from the descriptions below for which they wish to be considered.
Submit the paragraph, course list, CV, and possible projects via this application form by 11:59pm Monday, December 9, 2024. Contact Kai Dowding (kdowding [at] stanford.edu (kdowding[at]stanford[dot]edu)) with any questions.
AY 2024-25 Projects:
Unearthing the History of Slave Experiences in Saint-Domingue through Iconography: Building the Archives
Faculty Mentor: Rachel Jean-Baptiste
Project: Studied by scholars as the only known uprising of slaves that led to the creation of a nation-state, Haiti and its colonial antecedent of Saint-Domingue have been little studied for the history of slavery and slave experiences. A reason for this has been the vast dispersal and destruction of historical records and built environments during the Haitian Revolution itself. This project supports Professor Jean-Baptiste’s book project on narrating the history of Cap-Haïtien - a port city in Saint-Domingue which was known as the "Paris of the Antilles" in the 17th and 18th centuries. This city of wealth was built upon one of the most brutal slave systems of sugar cane production in the Americas, and yet the experiences of the African slaves who built and sustained it are barely known.
Research Tasks: This project focuses on building the archives to conduct the research to write these stories. Specifically, it focuses on geolocating and creating a database of the visual sources (paintings, drawings, postcards) and other forms of visual and material culture which slaves, free people of color, slave owners, and visitors to the city created to represent what they saw and experienced. The use of visual sources necessitates care, interpretation against the grain, and ethical considerations of how to narrate history in conditions of asymmetrical relationships of power. In amassing, sorting, and analyzing visual data, this project aims to explore these historical-ethical questions. Useful skills are curiosity; interest in the intersection of art, aesthetics and human suffering and agency; and interest in black Atlantic history. Ability to read French and Spanish a plus, but not necessary.
A Concise History of the Japanese Empire
Faculty Mentor: Jun Uchida
Project: Professor Uchida is commissioned by Cambridge University Press to write a concise history of the Japanese empire designed for classroom use. This project aims to provide a historical overview while placing Japanese colonialism in global and comparative perspective. Each chapter will be framed around key themes, including settler colonialism, environmental imperialism, discipline and biopolitical power, and the control of space and bodies. In dialogue with recent cutting-edge scholarship, Professor Uchida intends to explore the intersections of colonialism and racial capitalism, emphasizing intra- and inter-imperial connections and flows rather than focusing solely on individual colonies.
Research Tasks: Professor Uchida seeks a Research Assistant who can help identify and summarize both canonical and recent works on colonialism, with a primary focus on Japan but also including the United States and European powers.
OpenGulf: Mapping Colonial Imaginaries of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf
Faculty Mentor: Nora Barakat
Project: OpenGulf is nearing the end of a three-year Changing Human Experience grant period that will culminate in a symposium in May 2025, partly supported by the History Department. The symposium will mark the completion of a 50,000-row dataset of place names in the Persian Gulf region extracted from an early twentieth-century British gazetteer that can be used by students, educators, and the general public to create maps, smaller datasets and more complex comparative spatial research about this understudied postcolonial region.
Research Tasks: The research assistant will work with Professor Barakat and a CESTA team on the final process of data cleaning before publication of the dataset, including checking locations using online spatial databases like GeoNames and Google Maps, extracting unidentified locations, and organizing and labeling the data. Some experience with Google Sheets would be useful but not required; an interest in historical geography, the spatial history of empire, and/or the history of the Indian Ocean world, the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf. This position does not require any existing technical skills. Students with an interest in learning basic data management and mapping skills or utilizing existing skills are encouraged to apply.
Police Constables in Colonial Eastern India
Faculty Mentor: Parthapratim Shil
Project: Professor Shil’s book project focuses on the history of police constables and village watchmen in colonial eastern India, with specific geographical focus on the Bengali-speaking districts of the Bengal Presidency from c.1860 to 1950.
Research Tasks: The main assignment for the RA will be data entry. They will be provided with jpeg images of quantitative data in tabular form in archival materials and pdfs of published official reports. The relevant parts of this data will be pointed out and the research assistant will enter it onto excel spreadsheets in the directed format. The archival materials will include official sources from British India such as census reports, district gazetteers, etc. Though the data is in English, it includes numerous South Asian historical terms and names. Therefore, familiarity with South Asian history will be an asset, especially familiarity with north Indian and Bengali names, and administrative terms. However, this is not essential. This is also an opportunity for the RA to learn about colonial official sources for the study of modern South Asia in greater depth and become familiar with historical terminology relevant to this period and region. Most significantly, the RA will learn in the process how historians trace details of labor forces in colonial records.
Germany and The Cold War in the 1950s
Faculty Mentor: Steven Press
Project: Professor Press’s project explores how, during the 1950s, US plans about the partition of Germany evolved and were shaped by German public opinion.
Research Tasks: The RA would work with Professor Press in closely examining a number of documents in digitized American and German databases, including German-language newspapers. The RA will need to have the ability to read German. The RA will gain useful experience with primary sources and could conceivably develop their work into a thesis, later on, using materials located at the Hoover Archives.
Stung by Life. Philip Roth. A Biography
Faculty Mentor: Steven Zipperstein
Project: The work will entail standardizing endnotes for the preparation of a full-length biography of the writer Philip Roth, widely considered among the most influential American novelists of the 20th century. Roth wrote 31 books, and Professor Zipperstein used for his research some 20 archives and has interviewed more than 120 in the writing of a 400--page biography that will be published by the trade division of Yale University Press in fall 2025.
Research Tasks: Students working with Professor Zipperstein will be appraised of research techniques in literary biography, archival research methods, and the shaping of a literary biography that foregrounds a writer's work while taking in the full - often complex, and controversial - aspects of his life.
