The History Department is offering several paid research opportunities for Stanford undergraduates to participate in a faculty-led research project over the 2026 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 Wednesday, January 7, 2026. Contact Kai Dowding (kdowding [at] stanford.edu (kdowding[at]stanford[dot]edu)) with any questions.
AY 2025-26 Projects:
The History of Anglo-European "Free City" projects in Honduras
Faculty Mentor: Steven Press
Project: Professor Press is in the early stages of gathering and analyzing archival materials for a book project about the history of Europeans trying to carve out portions of Honduras for "free city" projects governed by outside laws and regulations. The current iteration, Prospera, lacks a history but is generating lots of attention and financing from Silicon Valley. An undergraduate RA will help to outline and give depth to the project.
Research Tasks: The RA will conduct digital archival work and help to process materials related to a book project concerning American and European imperial activity in Honduras. The RA will need some proficiency in international relations, along with some proficiency in the Spanish language.
Global Florence: The World of Francesco Carletti, 1573-1636
Faculty Mentor: Paula Findlen
Project: Professor Findlen seeks an undergraduate RA with the historical interests and technical skills required to design and create a website to translate scholarly research into public history. The Global Florence website will be the public face of a collaborative research project on Francesco Carletti (1573-1636) – Florentine merchant, repentant ex-slave trader, and the first person to accidentally circumnavigate the globe (1594-1602). The project is led by a team of historians from Stanford (Paula Findlen), the European University Institute (Giorgio Riello), Syracuse University (Brian Brege, Stanford BA&MA’07, PhD’14), and the University of Warwick (Anne Gerritsen), involving many other collaborators contributing to the exhibition design and content.
The website will host a virtual exhibition on Global Florence: The World of Francesco Carletti, 1573-1636/Firenze globale: il mondo di Francesco Carletti, 1573-1636. This exhibition uses Carletti’s journey from Seville to Cape Verde, the Spanish Americas (Cartagena, Panama, Lima, and Mexico City), Manila, Japan, Macau, Southeast Asia, Goa, St. Helena, and the Dutch Republic before returning to Florence in 1606 to explore Florence’s relations with an expanding world. The physical exhibition will be held at the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, Italy (October 9, 2026-January 9, 2027).
Research Tasks: The RA will learn about the content of the project to become an active participant in website content creation and design, working with the team to transform exhibit content into an engaging website. The website will ultimately host a series of interactive 3-5 min videos documenting key episodes in Carletti’s voyage as well as the making of the exhibition itself, including interviews with contributors. Ability to build an attractive professional website is required, experience making short professional videos desirable. Engagement with the exhibit content will give the RA the opportunity to assist us in creating an online work of public history that will be a resource on this subject after the physical exhibit closes and also host several other components of the Carletti project.
Wives of the Church: Marriage, Ordination, and Clerical Families, 900-1200
Faculty Mentor: Fiona Griffiths
Project: Professor Griffiths is finishing a book about women married to (or living with) churchmen before "celibacy" became a requirement for priests and other clerics (around 1150). The book looks at a variety of sources, such as church law, saints' lives, manuscript images, sculpture, and also economic records of gifts and donations to monasteries and other churches. The goal is to tease out a history of clerical wives, a category of women that has generally been left out of our histories of the medieval period.
Research Tasks: A sample task could be to follow up on a manuscript image of a married bishop and his wife, checking what text the image accompanies, what has been written about the manuscript, and whether there are other related images. Another could be to examine a series of donation records, with attention to when priests appear making gifts together with women. Professor Griffiths is not looking for specific language skills, although Latin, French or German could be useful. The most important thing is curiosity and organization.
"Slavery" after Abolition: The History of a Concept
Faculty Mentor: James P. Daughton
Project: This project investigates the afterlife of the concept of “slavery” in the social, political, and intellectual discourses of France and Britain in the century following abolition. It will explore how, once legally dismantled, the category of slavery was employed with new meanings across a range of ideological frameworks, including late-abolitionist, anti-colonial, and socialist critiques of social and economic power. The project will analyze the use of “slavery” not only as a metaphor for various forms of oppression – especially those shaped by race and class – but also as an analytical category.
Research Tasks: The project, conducted in conjunction with colleagues and researchers at Santa Clara University, seeks a research assistant to help identify and analyze primary documents ranging from political treatises to reports on abusive living or labor conditions. A reading knowledge of French or Spanish is preferred but not required.
