Research Projects

The Humanities Research Center will award summer research practica to undergraduates with strong backgrounds in the humanities. This program requires 200 hours of research-based work over the course of the summer with cutting-edge faculty on innovative humanities-based research projects. Fellows will receive stipends of $3,000.

The HRC Undergraduate Fellowship program is made possible through the generous support of Nancy and Clint Carlson, Nancy and Don Mafrige, Charles and Jane Szalkowski, Keith Lovin, John and Annette Eldridge, and Lily McKeage.

For more information on HRC undergraduate summer research fellowships, contact Paula Platt (pauladp@rice.edu).

2019-20 Undergraduate Research Fellowship Projects

Mentor: Mark P. Jones, Professor, Political Science
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Tessa Schreiber (Social Policy Analysis, History, '21) and Margaret Todd (Social Policy Analysis, History, '21)

Project Description: Tessa and Margaret assisted Prof. Jones with collecting data from The Texas Legislative History Project (TLHP) which contains the records of all the roll call votes from the Congress formed by the Republic of Texas to the present day Texas Legislature. The Texas Senate Journals during the period of 1846-1900 were targeted for review to better understand Texas politics, economics and society based on the subject of the item being voted on and how individual senators voted.

Mentor: José Aranda, Jr., Associate Professor of English and Latin American Studies
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Mia Guien (Art History, English, '22)

Project Description: Mia worked with Dr. Aranda's ongoing research of serial novels in the Spanish-language press of the U. S. prior to 1960. The project is part of the continuing research and translation initiative, Taller Americano de Traducción, and for ENGL 471 'Mexican American Novel in the Spanish-Language Press,' that has a curricular component of translating a novel into English during the course offering.

Mentor: Christopher Sperandio, Associate Professor, Visual and Dramatic Arts
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Isabel Samperio (Visual and Dramatic Arts, 21)

Project Description: Isabel assisted Prof. Sperandio in the production of a digital library of comic books from the public domain. The resulting collection will be a keyword searchable library of documents in PDF format, customized with metadata reflecting the publication infomration on those works, contributors, genre, and descriptions of content.

Mentor: Alida C. Metcalf, Professor, History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Christina Zhou (Architecture, '22)

Project Description: Christina continued her collaborations with Dr. Metcalf, having previously worked on the illustrations in the forthcoming publication, Mapping an Atlantic World, ca. 1500, the focus switched to the production of an upcoming books on water in Rio de Janeiro. Illustrations for approximately twenty fountains and two aqueducts will be created. In addition, Christina will assist in building an image database on Gilberto Ferrez's, Iconografia do Rio de Janeiro, a two-volume publication on the major artistic works depicting Rio.

Mentor: Natasha Bowdoin, Associate Professor, Visual and Dramatic Arts
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Sarah Easley (Political Science, Visual and Dramatic Arts, '20)

Project Description: Sarah provided assistance research and cataloguing images of Bauhaus pattern design for Prof. Bowdoin's preparations of two upcoming exhibitions, a solo show at the Amon Carter Museum, Forth Worth in December, 2020, and a permanent installation for the Rice Public Art Collection in the Anderson Biology Building.

Mentor: Ian Schimmel, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, English
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Lily Wulfemeyer (English, '20)

Project Description: Lily collaborated in the design, promotion, and on-line syndication of a new, Houston-based literary magazine, Texlandia. The project from Rice faculty members Ian Schimmel, Lacy Johnson, and Natasha Bowdoin is being produced in partnership with Inprint, Writers in the School, Project Tintero, and the Museum of Fine Arts-Houston.

Mentor: Lora Wildenthal, Professor, History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Alizay Azeem (Social Science division, '23)

Project Description: Alizay conducted research on "Imperial feminism" described as the Western claim that women from other countries/cultures need to be saved and often serves as justification for imperial ventures, marginalizing feminist movements. This project will highlight the phenomenon by spotlighting existing research sources (https://libguides.rice.edu/womenstudies) on it and adding related historical materials from the 18th-century to recent interventions.

Mentor: Kirsten Ostherr, Professor, English
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Alison Hyunji Oh (Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, '21)

Project Description: Alison assisted Dr. Ostherr with research for a chapter on the book project, 'Seeing and Sensing the Environmental Health Exposome.' The chapter will expand the discussion of datafication and global health from the question of how the concept of "virutal health" intersects with the knowledge formations defining the health impacts of global climate change.

Mentor: Alexander X. Byrd, Associate Professor, History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Ashley Snell (History, Psychology, 21), Divya Choudhury (Neuroscience, History, '21), and Vatsala Mundra (Biochemistry & Cell Biology, History, '21)

Project Description: Ashley, Divya, and Vatsala looked to expand on their reserach from Prof. Byrd's course, HIST 421 'Race, Education and Society,' on the educational impacts of COVID-19 on both Asian American and African American students. The new direction would look at the causes of pandemic-related racial disparities in healthcare, especially as they are tied to education and housing, and their disproportionate effects of environmental injustices on black communities.

Mentor: Kirsten Ostherr, Professor, English
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Conor Rork (Classical Studies, '21)

Project Description: Conor joined a group, with Dr. Ostherr, ingestigating frontline and global Medical Humanities responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project involved assisting with interviews of research participants, conducting literature surveys and qualitative research, and assisting with database management.

Mentor: Esther Fernández, Assistant Professor, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Erin Krusleski (Psychology, Spanish and Portuguese, '21)

Project Description: Erin conducted research, gathered materials, and translated excerpts on the 'concept of invisibility' in 17th-century Spanish literature. The concept arose in fictional works from the Novatores as a phenomenon diassociated from magic and justified through disciplines grounded in sicence, technology, philosophy, and theology. Prof. Fernández wil use this work for an article in edited collection, The Dawn of the Baroque.

Mentor: Daniel Comingues, Associate Professor, History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Katherine Ngyuen (Art History, Social Policy Analysis, '22)

Project Description: Katherine assisted Dr. Domingues with collecting data for the Intra-American Slave Trade Database as part of the "Slave Voyages" website/database. She examined and documented 19th-century newspapers, evaluating and coding them for significant motifs and information related to the Trans-Atlantic slave experiences and narratives.

Mentor: Lora Wildenthal, Professor, History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Leon Soifer (Political Science, History, '22)

Project Description: Leon helped Prof. Wildenthal in her preparations to teach HIST 101 'Modern Europe 1550-1789' and HIST 108 'World History since 1492.' The project entailed gathering primary sources and devloping homework questions along five themes: state formation, military changes, ideas and the economy, ideas about religion, and ideas about scientific knowledge.

Mentor: Andrea Ballestero, Associate Professor, Anthropology
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Mai Han Ton (Asian Studies, Visual and Dramatic Arts, '21)

Project Description: Mai Han worked with Dr. Ballestero researching historical and contemporary renderings of underground water or subterranean imaginaries, analyzing their aesthetic elements, the contexts from which they emerged, and the braoder economic projects they were associated with.

Mentor: Melissa Bailar, Adjunct Lecturer in Humanities, Humanities Research Center
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Morgan Seay (Social Policy Analysis, '22)

Project Description: Morgan undertook research to analyze and explore the exoticization of the female body in medicine by exploring the history of medical museums and anatomical Venuses, and the impact of patriarchal constructions of women and their health.

Mentor: Timothy Morton, Professor, English
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Taylor Crain (English, '21)

Project Description: Taylor worked on writing her second book of a speculative fiction triology under the guidance of Prof. Morton. The story "explores the healing, growth, and internal conflict of a young black woman as she navigates an alternate world reminiscent of Hayao Miyazakis' magical realsim and Octavia Butler's social justice themes in Parable of the Sower and Dawn in order to find her way back home."

Mentor: Alden Sajor Marte-Wood, Assistant Professor, English
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Tiffany Sloan (Asian Studies, '22)

Project Description: Tiffany worked on a collaboration with Dr. Marte-Wood that crossed the disciplines of environmental activism, critical theory, and policy analysis, combining their research of climate change, "slow violience," and energy proverty in the Philippines. The result will be submitted for independent publication.

Mentor: Aisulu Raspayeva, Post-doctoral Fellow, Center for Languages and Intercultural Communications
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Ivan Gamov (Social Science division, '23)

Project Description: Ivan assisted Dr. Raspayeva in a study that examines the transnational experiences and social beliefs regarding Russian and other languages among Russian immigrants of three different generations; those who came to the United States as adults, children before the age of 5 who were brought to the U. S., and children who were born in the States. Sociolinguistic interviews gathered perspectives and perceptions on language, its usage, and multi-cultural identities. The study was funded in part by the Dean of Humanities.

Mentor: Claire Fanger, Associate Profesor, Religion
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Marian Nájera (Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations, Religion, Anthropology, '21)

Project Description: Marian contined to conduct research towards her senior thesis on the practice of magic by Mexican women. Data was gathered from the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City and the Archivos de la Arquidióces de Monterrey, to explore the circumstances surrounding women tried by the Inquisitorial Office of New Spain (Mexico) for the use of witchcraft during the 15th-17th centuries.

Mentor: Shih-shan Susan Huang, Associate Professor, Art History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Zhaorui Rita Xiong (5th-year Architecture)

Project Description: Zhaorui worked with Dr. Huang on her forthcoming Chinese publication on Daoist and Buddhist visual culture. The project focused on editorial and translation work, checking footnotes, formatting, the bibliography, and compiling illustrations.

2018-19 Undergraduate Research Fellowship Projects

Mentor: Julie Fette, Associate Professor, Classican and European Studies
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Annelise Goldman (Environmental Science, '22)

Project Description: Annelise served as Dr. Fette's research assistant on her second book, about gender in contemporary French children's literature.

Mentor: Geoffrey Winningham, Professor, Visual and Dramatic Arts
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Erin Vance (Cognitive Sciences, '22)

Project Description: Erin assisted Dr. Winningham in his photographic study of the natural landscape of the greater Houston area.

Mentor: Jeff Kripal, Professor, Department of Religion
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Mariana Najera (Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations, Religion, Anthropology, '21)

Project Description: Mariana assisted Dr. Kripal in his organizational work as the Woodson Research Center intakes a major new archive of correspondence relating to paranormal occurrences.

Mentor: Kerry Ward, Associate Professor, History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Lily Wulfmeyer (English, '20)

Project Description: Lily assisted Dr. Dirk Van Teurenhout, HMNS Curator of Anthoropology, work in redesigning the Houston Museum of Natural Science's John P. McGovern Hall of the Americas.

Mentor: Shishan Huang, Associate Professor, Art History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Zhaorui Xiong (Architecture, '20)

Project Description: Zhaorui served as Dr. Huang's research assistant for her book-length project, Buddhist Printing, Circulation Networks, and Cultural Transformation in East Asia, 850-1450.

Mentor: Niki Clements, Associate Professor, Department of Religion
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Bilal Rehman (Philosophy, '20)

Project Description: Bilal assisted Dr. Clements in cataloguing the bibliographical entries related to the study of religion in Michel Foucault's late works.

Mentor: John Mulligan, Lecturer in the Public Humanities, Humanities Research Center
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Isabel Kilroy (Cognitive Sciences, '20)

Project Description: Isabel developed an online exhibit of the Kaderli Letters on Death and Dying held by the Woodson Research Center at Rice. Her writing built on Tristan Boss's previous work with the archive in the Spring 2019 semester, in an HRC health humanities practicum.

Mentor: Anne Chao, Adjunct Lecture in Humanities, School of Humanities
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Priscilla Li (Biological Sciences, '19)

Project Description: Priscilla has been an extremely responsive and productive research assistant on the Houston Asian American Archive (HAAA), undertaking interviews and applying rigorous fact-checking and study-aid additions to transcripts. She has done detailed research in preparation for the Chao Center's online journal, "Transnational Asia," on HAAA.

Mentor: Randal Hall, Professor, History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Paige DeVos (Anthropology, '19)

Project Description: Paige assisted Dr. Hall with work on his book project investigating environmental thought in the United States in the 1950's. Paige worked through microfilmed or digitized newspapers and other documents identifying relevant material for an investigation of agricultural ideas.

Mentor: Julie Fette, Associate Professor, Classical and European Studies
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Meredith McCain (Political Science, French Studies, '20)

Project Description: Meredith is a joint major in French Studies and Political Science. She was uniquely capable of aiding Dr. Fette in research in French-language materials about French society. She learned about humanistic research methods and academic publishing in the textbook arena while helping Dr. Fette conduct research in service of a new edition of "Les Francais," a college textbook in French that presents an overview of French society in all its facets.

Mentor: Marcia Brennan, Professor, Religion and Art History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Lynn Zhu (Statistics, '19)

Project Description: Lynn, a medical humanities undergraduate student, assisted Dr. Brennan in collecting and producing materials for her "Rehabilitation Medicine Storybook," which will feature original visual and literary artworks, coupled with related analytical reflections on our humanistic and STEM collaborations on stories drawn from a Rehabilitation medicine population in treatment with Professor Marcia O'Malley's Mechatronics and Haptic Interfaces (MAHI) Lab, where Dr. Brennan, working as a Literary Artist, engages research subjects who participate in various experimental studies in upper extremity robotic therapies.

Mentor: Gisela Heffes, Associate Professor, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Mariana Nájera (Religion, '21) and Abigail González (Spanish and Portuguese, '21)

Project Description: Mariana and Abigail helped with a portion of the research for a book Dr. Heffes co-edited with Professor Jennifer French from Williams College, The Latin American Eco-Cultural Reader. The Reader was a substantial undertaking, in every way. It offered a diverse selection of literary and cultural texts about the natural world from Latin America, from the colonial period to the present. Mariana and Abigail completed preliminary research on an ample number of the texts that have gone into our current table of contents. She assisted with the completion of the project by drafting short, 1-paragraph introductions to each of the 45 selections based on Professor Frenchs' and Dr. Heffes' notes and their investigation of secondary sources.

Mentor: Farès el-Dahdah, Professor, Humanities Research Cener and School of Architecture
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Laura "Maddie" Shen (Computer Science, '21)

Project Description: unavailable

Mentor: Anne Chao, School of Humanities
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Juno Rettenmier (Political Science, Latin American Studies, '19)

Project Description: unavailable

Mentor: Jose Aranda, Associate Professor, English and Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Catherine Soltero (Political Science, Spanish and Portuguese, '19)

Project Description: Catherine assisted Dr. Aranda in his ongoing research of serial novels in the Spanish-language press of the U.S. prior to 1960. In Spring 2015, as part of English 471, The Mexican American Novel in the Spanish-Language Press, Rice students first translated Los Pochos, by Jorge Ainslie. This novel was published serially in 1934 in La Prensa, a well-known Spanish language newspaper of San Antonio, Texas. Catherine assisted in finalizing preliminary materials for the next iteration of the course, retrieving materials from the America's Historical Newspapers database, and reformatting them for translation purposes.

Mentor: Brian Riedel, Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Cameron Wallace (English, '19)

Project Description: unavailable

Mentor: Christopher Sperandio, Associate Professor, Visual and Dramatic Arts
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Helena Martin (Visual and Dramatic Arts, '19)

Project Description: Helena was involved in the production of Professor Sperandio's current graphic project, a 288-page, three-volume political satire, set in a speculative future. Helena provided assistance by inking pages from this book and scanning them into files. These pages had already been scripted, designed and lettered. She completed the final step by using a brush and ink, working over the pages that Sperandio had already prepared.

Mentor: John Mulligan, HRC
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Adolfo Carvalho (Astrophysics, Mathematics, '19)

Project Description: Adolfo designed and built a prototype simulator of the historical observation runs ("sweeps") made by Caroline and William Herschel at the end of the 18th century just outside London. Their work, which led to the development of modern cosmology and the foundation of the Royal Astronomical Society, is generally famous but hard to grasp practically because of its abstract nature. Adolfo's work allows users to see, roughly moment for moment, what William Herschel saw based on our knowldge as gleaned from the archive. In order to build this simulator, Adolfo had to familiarize himself with the archive, its legacy, and historical interpretations; he taught himself C++ development; and he wrote reflections on his work.

Mentor: John Mulligan, HRC
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Bilal Rehman (Philosophy, '19)

Project Description: Bilal, a philosophy major deeply involved in Rice's medical humanities program, worked this summer with archival materials relating to pre-photographic visual anatomy atlases. Bilal familiarized himself with theories of embodiment and objectivity, performed bibliographical research in the history of science and medicine, and worked directly with the extensive medical archives in the rare books room at the University of Texas Medical Branch Galveston. His literature reviews, annotated bibliographies, and photographic cataloguing of rare archival materials further develops Dr. Mulligan's work on the history of visual anatomical media and in service of future publications on Vesalius, Chardin, and embodiment.

2017-18 Undergraduate Research Fellowship Projects

Faculty Mentor: Jose Aranda, English
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Elizabeth Martinez

Project Description: Elizabeth worked with Jose F. Aranda, Jr., who holds dual appointments in the departments of English and Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies; Arranda is also a board member of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and co-founder of Avanzamos: El Taller Chicana/o, an annual workshop focused on advanced scholarship in Chicana/o Studies, sponsored by Rice University and the University of North Texas. Ms. Martinez helped Aranda on his recovery project, transcribing texts found in the periodical La Prensa. She retyped the texts, making them readable and identified different typos or anomalies in the original PDFs so that the texts would be in a usable format for the translation course Dr. Aranda taught in Fall 2017.

Faculty Mentor: Nicole Waligora-Davis, English
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Tessa Fries

Project Description: Tessa worked with Nicole Waligora-Davis, who specializes in late-nineteenth and 20th century African American and American literary and cultural criticism, with a particular emphasis on black intellectual history, black internationalism, legal studies, critical race theory, and visual culture. On one project, Ms. Fries gathered information for Waligora-Davis was editing, called African-American Literature in Transition, vol. 1910-1920 (CambridgeUniversity Press). Ms. Fries collected primary source material for the introduction to the volume and generated a historical timeline that lists key political, cultural (art, film, music, literature, drama, poetry), legal, and social events in American and African American history between 1910-1920. On the second project, Ms. Fries gathered source materials for The Murder Book: Race, Forensics and the Value of Black Life,the book Waligora-Davis was writing at the time.

Faculty Mentor: Scott Colman, Architecture
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Toshiki Niimi (Architecture, '19)

Project Description: coming soon

Faculty Mentor: Scott Colman, Architecture
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Michelle Wonkyung Chung

Project Description: coming soon

Faculty Mentor: Scott McGill, Classical and European Studies; and John Hopkins, Art History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Susannah Leigh Wright

Project Description: Susannah worked with Scott McGill, who is professor and chair of Classical and European Studies and currently focuses his research on Latin poetry in Late Antiquity; and John Hopkins, an assistant professor in Classical and European Studies who is co-director of the program in Museums and Cultural Heritage. Ms. Wright helped to develop a collaborative bibliography and manage website materials for the year-long Rice Seminar. She also helped to coordinate logistics, liaise with scholars, and conduct foundational research for the seminar.

Faculty Mentor: John Mulligan, HRC
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Miriam Shayeb (English, Spanish and Portuguese, '19)

Project Description: Miriam worked in the Summer of 2017 as the HRC's first summer-term practicum student. Working as an independent researcher in the Texas Medical Center's McGovern Historical Research Center, she combed through the collections on Dr. Joseph Jones, a 19th-c. epidemiologist and the postbellum public health commissioner for New Orleans. Her final paper for the practicum, which can be found on the HRC practica projects site, won her a prize for Excellence in Humanities Research at the Rice Undergraduate Research Symposium in May 2018. Miriam is the 2018-19 President of the Medical Humanities club, and her previous medical humanities practica work for Rice's Woodson Research Center can be viewed online.

Faculty Mentor: John Mulligan, HRC
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Augusto De Las Casas (Biological Sciences, '19)

Project Description: Augusto's work, funded in part by a generous grant from the Doerr Institute for New Leaders, began in the Summer of 2017. Augusto researched theories and practical guidelines for professional medical interpretation, and identified key questions in the current models; specifically, the experience of medical interpreters themselves has gone under-studied in the literature. In the fall semester of 2018, as an HRC practicum student and under the mentorship of Baylor College of Medicine David Hyman, Professor and Chief of Medicine, Larry Laufman, Assistant Professor of General Medicine, and Ricardo Nuila, Assistant Professor of General Medicine (and a well-known writer in medical humanities), Augusto designed a research protocol that was accepted by the Baylor, Harris Health, and Rice University IRB boards, for a study of medical interpreters' experiences in hospital settings. Doerr generously extended the term of his funding's availability, and in the Spring and Summer of 2018, he conducted his interviews and wrote up his findings. As of August 2018 he is preparing his findings for peer-review submission, as the paper's primary author.

Faculty Mentor: John Mulligan, HRC
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Sarah Lasater (Social Policy, '19)

Project Description: Sarah's work, funded in part by a generous grant from the Doerr Institute for New Leaders, began in the Summer of 2017. She conducted literature reviews for a research team led by Jennifer Christner, Dean of the College of Medicine at Baylor. Christner's team was investigating what community stakeholders hold to be valuable areas of physician competency but which may not be addressed in current medical school curricula. Sarah developed her own parallel research agenda into models of physician leadership in a changing healthcare environment. She continued her work under the HRC practica program during the academic year, during which time she worked as a member of Dr. Christner's team, helping to conduct interviews with community stakeholders and writing up findings. The team's work has been submitted for publication, with Sarah listed as a co-author. Her own writing on "horizontal leadership" took a prize for Excellence in Humanities Research at the Rice Undergraduate Research Symposium in May 2018.

Faculty Mentor: John Mulligan, HRC
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Shaian Mohammadian (Biological Sciences, '18)

Project Description: Shaian's work, funded in part by a generous grant from the Doerr Institute for New Leaders, took place in the Summer of 2017. Shaian explored the nature of medical leadership from an administrative lens, working in the office of Robert B. Trieu, Director of Clinical Affairs at Baylor College of Medicine. Shaian informally interviewed physician-administrators at Baylor to explore the much-storied tension between the two roles, and found this to be a phenomenon whose problematic nature was overstated and interesting complexity was understated and misunderstood! His final essay based on these interviews, "Suits and Coats: Administrators and Physicians at Baylor College of Medicine," can be read on the HRC practica student projects site.

2016-17 Undergraduate Research Fellowship Projects

Faculty Mentor: Kimberly Davenport, Rice Gallery
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Emilia Cavallaro (Architecture, ’18)

Project Description: The summer fellow will be responsible for overhauling the Rice Gallery’s image library, including thinking up strategies to move forward. Student will add photos to the library and create metadata. The fellow will also work on a model/database that will eventually use selected images to ‘diachronically’ depict a 3D environment of the gallery. This project is in conjunction with Digital Scholarship Services and the Woodson Research Center at Fondren Library. Additional projects may include: researching upcoming installations, working on gallery catalogues, and assisting with the gallery’s physical archives.

Faculty Mentor: Nicole Waligora-Davis, Associate Professor of English
Undergraduate Research Fellow: James Carter (English and Psychology, ’17)

Project Description: James Carter will assist Dr. Waligora-Davis in gathering primary source material for both the introduction to a volume on African-American writing that she is editing for Cambridge University Press, and for an essay Dr. Waligora-Davis is commissioned to write for a separate volume in the series that addresses the response of the Black Left (1930-1940) to the Italo-Ethiopian conflict. He will also work on developing a relevant historical chronology for the 1910-1920 volume Dr. Waligora-Davis is editing.
The student will work with microfilm and electronic database research related to noteworthy historical, literary, cultural, and legal events and figures between 1910-1020,, including but not limited to WWI; Pan-American Conferences; formation of the NAACP and Urban League; lynching; “new negro movement”; Red-Summer 1919; precedent-setting legal cases related to black Americans; W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Chestnutt, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, etc. For the second project, James will be focusing on 19th and early 20th century representations of Ethiopia in black literature and expressive traditions; political histories of the Italo-Ethiopian crisis; and coverage of the conflict in mainstream and African-American newspapers and periodicals.

Faculty Mentor: Matthias Henze, Isla Caroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Sparrow Gates (Religion, ’17)

Project Description: The Hebrew Bible only presents us with a slim excerpt of the literature in circulation in ancient Israel. This project, titled Lost Judaisms, seeks to collect information about the non-canonical ancient Jewish writings. This year the focus is on a text known as the Ascension of Isaiah, a Jewish apocalypse that has been adopted and rewritten by Christians in Late Antiquity.

Faculty Mentor: S. Wright Kennedy, Doctoral Candidate in History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Manlin Yao (Cognitive Sciences, ’18)

Project Description: The New Orleans Mortality Project (http://nola.spatialhistory.org) focuses on the city in the Gilded Age (1877-1910) to examine how health, environment, and socioeconomics impacted urban and community development. This project investigates the nexus of environment, health, and poverty. It will employ interdisciplinary methods to analyze individual-level mortality data in New Orleans to uncover the spatial characteristics of the mortality transitions and the effects of uneven transitions; an approach that is only recently possible thanks to the development of geographic information systems.
This project uses a new approach to study history: historical geographic information systems (HGIS). The research team is building a spatial mortality database of 200,000 deaths to study the evolving spatial and temporal patterns of health across individuals and communities in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century. This will enable an examination of the intersections of disease, economics, and urban development with new levels of complexity and insight. The results of this analysis will reveal the process of the mortality transitions and the evolution and effects of the urban disease terrain, crucial information for understanding the history of urban development.

Faculty Mentor: Melissa Bailar, Professor in the Practice of Humanities
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Marley Foster (English and Visual & Dramatic Arts, ’18)

Project Description: Marley Foster worked with Melissa Bailar on identifying contemporary French and Francophone women filmmakers who experiment with cinematic narrative form. Marley conducted research in published collections and online resources to determine the works of such filmmakers, watched the films that might or might not be experimental, and wrote an annotated filmography. She identified dozens of films made in the 2000's that disrupt classical cinematographic and narrative conventions to account for female experience in new ways.

Faculty Mentor: Moramay Lopez-Alonso, Associate Professor of History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Raul DeLira (History, ’18)

Project Description: Mapping Disease and Famine in Eighteenth Century Mexico (New Spain): This project examines the living standards of the population of New Spain (colonial Mexico) during the second half of the eighteenth century. For this, we intend to reconstruct the living conditions of people at that time, we will be working with two bodies of evidence: agricultural disasters and epidemics of that time period. With GIS tools we will construct a map to see which localities experienced climate disasters that produced a decline of agriculture production in a given year. We will also create a map of disease and epidemic outbreaks by year and by localities. By putting together these two layers of information we will ascertain the causal relation between agriculture disasters, famines and spread of disease in the different localities of colonial Mexico.
This project will also assess the nature of diseases, and their link to malnutrition with the information available today. The analysis of diseases will be complemented with literature on the history of medicine to investigate what the medical knowledge on the recorded diseases was at the time, in terms of diagnosis, prevention, and cures. We will examine if higher densities of population were correlated to disease environment due to poor sanitary infrastructure with supplemental information from the population census of 1791-93.
This is an interesting period to study because there were various years of bad weather and one that was catastrophic: 1785, also known as the “year of famine” (año del hambre). In contrast, this is also a period of economic prosperity due to a significant increase in silver production. This information will be useful to investigate how much of economic prosperity translated into better living conditions for the population of colonial Mexico, and if there were regional differences or not. This would shed light on how wealthy mining regions fared relative to other regions in the country and the degree of market integration.

Faculty Mentor: Anthony Brandt, Associate Professor of Composition and Theory, and David Eagleman, Adjunct Assistant Professor of ECE and Cognitive Sciences
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Sarah G. Graves (Composition, ’18)

Project Description: What is creativity? How does it work? Why do we have it? And where is it taking us? In a time when the old ways of living are being torn up and remodeled, human civilization is facing challenges that require all our ingenuity to address. In The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World (Canongate, forthcoming Oct. 2017), neuroscientist David Eagleman and composer Anthony Brandt unravel the threads of the arts, neuroscience, evolution and technology which make up the tapestry of human creativity, leading us on a tour through the history of innovation from the moon landings to Picasso's 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'. In doing so, Brandt and Eagleman offer a powerful examination of creativity, the strategies which stimulate it, and how it can be a driving force to propel us into the future. Through understanding our ability to innovate - our most profound, mysterious and deeply human capacity - we can rise to meet the challenge of remaking our constantly shifting world.
Undergraduate composer Sarah Grace Graves has agreed to assist David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt on the final preparation of The Runaway Species, which includes researching the images, completing the footnotes and bibliography, proofing the manuscript and more.

Faculty Mentor: John Mulligan, Lecturer in the Public Humanities
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Benjamin Rasich (Mechanical Engineering, ’18) and Isaac Philips (Mechanical Engineering, ’17)

Project Description: The Electronic Vesalius: This project attempted to "reanimate" Andreas Vesalius' 16th-century anatomical atlas, De humani corporis fabrica, one of the foundational texts in modern medicine. The end-product was an interactive, life-sized exhibit of one of Vesalius' flayed bodies, which responds to a reader's touch with information about that body part as represented over the last five centuries. It has been installed in the TMC Library. In a close collaboration between partners at Fondren Library (Ying Jin), the Texas Medical Center Library's McGovern Historical Center (Philip Montgomery and Sandra Yates), and the OEDK (Matthew Wettergreen, Benjamin Rasich, and Isaac Philips), this project seeks to explore 1) the possibilities of interdisciplinary work in humanities/engineering collaborations, 2) the role of physicality in the digital humanities, and 3) the anatomy of ersatz life forms.
You can read about the project's construction here.

Faculty Mentor: José Aranda, Associate Professor of English
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Stacie M. Martinez (English, ’17)

Project Description: Stacie Martinez assisted Dr. Aranda in his ongoing research on serial novels in the Spanish-language press of the United States prior to 1960, which focuses mostly on writers of either Mexican or Mexican-American descent. As part of this research, Stacie assisted Dr. Aranda in finalizing primary materials for the course English 471, The Mexican American Novel in the Spanish-Language Press, a course designed to translate one of these novels into English, by retrieving materials from the database America’s Historical Newspapers and reformatting them for class purposes. She furthermore researched on available biographical data on the author Jorge Ainslie, whose novel Los Repatriados will be translated in the course.

Faculty Mentor: Scott McGill, Professor of Classics
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Susannah Wright (Medieval/Classical Studies and Early Modern Studies, ’18)

Project Description: Susannah Wright assisted Prof. McGill in his commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid II, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press. The commentary is a line-by-line analysis of Aeneid II. Such commentaries are standard in Classics; they focus on matters of interpretations language, prosody, and history. Essentially, they are designed to explicate the poem line-by-line and even word-by-word. In this fellowship Susannah, an advanced student in Classics with an expertise in Virgil, has offered her feedback on Prof. McGill’s translations. Furthermore, Susannah has researched and annotated books and articles pertaining to Prof. McGill’s project.

Faculty Mentor: Scott Colman, Assistant Professor of Architecture
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Toshiki Niimi (Architecture and German, ’17. Undergraduate research assistant Spatial Humanities)

Project Description: Comprehending Ludwig Hilberseimer: This project concerns the digital reconstruction of the key urban proposals of the influential German-American architect Ludwig Hilberseimer: his Hochhausstadt project of 1924, and his studies for Chicago, published in The New City in 1944. Hilberseimer was central to art and architectural discourse in the Weimar Republic, an important Bauhaus pedagogue, and a long-time collaborator and friend of the leading modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Focused on the principles of urban design, Hilberseimer’s planning is particularly suited to digital representation that models the controlling parameters rather than the final form of a designed work. In this way, a synthetic three-dimensional model not only helps in the historical comprehension of Hilberseimer’s propositions, it becomes a tool for generating projective alternatives to those Hilberseimer might not have himself envisioned. Fundamentally concerned with the mutable spatial and temporal relationships between individuals, society, and the environment, Hilberseimer’s visionary conception of the city exceeded the representational capacities of its time. This has limited our understanding of his work and its potential influence. This project is an effort to leverage new representational means toward an expanded realization of Hilberseimer’s historical and contemporary relevance. Hilberseimer’s humanistic approach to the city, encompassing the historical, social, political-economic, technological, environmental, and aesthetic aspects of urban life, offers an important precedent and valuable tools for the comprehensive re-conception of our urban world.

Faculty Mentor: Anne Chao, Adjunct Lecturer of the Humanities
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Jason Yin (Statistics, Mathematical Economic Analysis, ’19)

Project Description: The Houston Asian American Archive (HAAA): The Houston Asian American Archive is a collection of oral history interviews of Asian American immigrants to Houston. It has become an important repository for the history of Asian American immigration to the Southwestern region of the United States, and remedies the overlooked contribution of Asian Americans in Texas history. Started in the summer of 2010, the archive has come of age and it is time to re-assess the entire project. The fellow will help design a new training module for interns by researching the current best practices in the field. The fellow will also participate in formulating a strategic plan for the future of the archive, in exploring some of the potential directions for collecting oral history, as well as in preparing a guideline by which the archival history will be collected. The fellow will also have an opportunity to suggest potential design for a web page on HAAA, but he/she does not have to possess any web-design skill. The fellow will meet with Dr. Chao on a flexible schedule throughout the summer.

2015-16 Undergraduate Research Fellowship Projects

Faculty Mentor: Melissa Bailar, Professor in the Practice

Undergraduate Research Fellow: Jake Levens (English, '16)

Project Description: Quantum Cinematics examines the ways in which French and Francophone experimental women writer-directors craft alternative narrative structures to communicate experience, perception, and imagination. While they do not consciously explore scientific advancements, the narrative models that they create adopt traits of the quantum conception of the way the universe works as they move beyond gender and genre categorizations. The intern will watch films and read novels key to this project; find other critical resources; and meet with Melissa Bailar regularly to talk through written pieces and ideas still in formation.

Faculty Mentor: Anthony Brandt, Associate Professor of Composition and Theory
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Greg Kamback (Architecture, '16)

Project Description: Neuroscientist David Eagleman (author of Sum, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain and Wednesday is Indigo Blue) and Rice composition professor Anthony Brandt are co-authoring a book with the working title The Innovation Manifesto: Cultivating Creativity from the Boardroom to the Classroom. In the book, they assert that creativity is a universal feature of human cognition whose basic mechanisms can be described in simple terms and thereby modeled, practiced and taught. They take a broadly inter-disciplinary approach, linking disparate fields through shared creative processes.
Central to the book are the numerous illustrations that serve as exemplars. They are seeking a fellow with research and graphic and website design experience to help them with: securing copyright clearance for the images that they have selected and, when necessary, researching alternate and supplemental images; and helping with the layout and design of several sections of the book that are visually intensive. There may be additional research projects as well. In addition, Dr. Brandt is seeking the fellow’s help in developing a professional website for his composition and research.

Faculty Mentor: Joseph Campana, Alan Dugald McKillop Associate Professor of English
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Arlen Walker (Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations, '17)

Project Description: Renaissance Life Webs is a long-term, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary digital humanities project devoted to creating an open-source repository of Renaissance natural history texts. The project will yield an editorial collective where scholars will “sign on” to edit and annotate various works of natural history. This project will be an open archive, controlled-crowd-sourced site that will provide access to these Renaissance texts in modern editions, some for the first time. The texts will be modernized, fully annotated, and tagged to maximize searchability and to allow users to create their own clusters of texts in response to their own research interests. This larger digital project itself hopes to tap into the ethos of the hive, a collective of scholars where many labor to produce modern editions for the benefit of a larger community. To launch the platform, co-collaborators—Joseph Campana (Rice University) and Keith Botelho (Kennesaw State University) would create a pilot site by creating a collaboratively-authored edition of eight significant bee treatises published in England from 1593-1679, which will form the inaugural instance of Renaissance Life Webs and enable experimentation with digital platforms and styles of presentation and provide an initial instance of the project both useful to a wide scholarly attention and highly realized to attract future funding. The summer internship would involve transcription, TEI work, and other research work involving these Renaissance texts.

Faculty Mentor: Anne Chao, Adjunct Lecturer
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Patricia Wong (English, '16)

Project Description: The Houston Asian American Archive is a collection of oral history interviews of Asian American immigrants to Houston. It has become an important repository for the history of Asian American immigration to the Southwestern region of the United States, and remedies the overlooked contribution of Asian Americans in Texas history. Started in the summer of 2010, the archive has come of age and it is time to re-assess the entire project. The fellow will help design a new training module for interns by researching the current best practices in the field. The fellow will also participate in formulating a strategic plan for the future of the archive, in exploring some of the potential directions for collecting oral history, as well as in preparing a guideline by which the archival history will be collected. The fellow will also have an opportunity to suggest potential design for a web page on HAAA, but he/she does not have to possess any web-design skill. The fellow will meet with Dr. Chao on a flexible schedule throughout the summer.

Faculty Mentor: Farès el-Dahdah, Professor of the Humanities
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Christian Hauser (Classical Studies, fall '15)

Project Description: The objective of this project is to design a digital atlas of the Rice Campus where visual archives, locatable in time and space, can be embedded. This involves building a map that not only changes according to specific years but that ultimately shows the campus as it once was as well as it was once imagined. In its first iteration the project addresses the history of the campus, the organizing of its architectural archives, and the mapping of its evolution between 1908 and 1912. The Fellow will learn about the history of the institution as well as train in such applications as ArcGIS and Shared Shelf.

Faculty Mentor: Matthias Henze, Isla Carroll & Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Ellen Marsh

Project Description: Jews at the time of Jesus and Hillel continued to write books, even though all the books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament were already written. Not many of these "extra" writings are well known today, mostly because they are not part of our Bibles. The purpose of this project is to compile a data base of these ancient texts. The focus this summer is on a text known as "Joseph and Aseneth." The project involves some reading, library work, and discussions with the professor.

Faculty Mentor: Scott McGill
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Susannah Wright (Classical Studies, '18)

Project Description: I am completing a verse translation, with introduction and notes, of a 3200-line Latin poem, the Evangeliorum libri IV of Juvencus. The poem, from the fourth century CE, is the first Christian epic in the western tradition. The student will help with the translation, going over every line to edit and polish the work. By summer's end, we will have reviewed the entire poem.

Faculty Mentor: Alexander Regier, Associate Professor of English
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Matt McGee (English, '16)

Project Description: William Blake is what these days we might call a multi-media artist. This project will trace his impact in contemporary culture and scholarship. The student will need to be able to search databases and have familiarity with bibliographical research. Knowledge of German is an advantage.

Faculty Mentor: John Sparagana
Undergraduate Research Fellow: Monica Burckhardt (Architecture, '15)

Project Description: Assist with a series of complex visual constructions utilizing deconstruted images from Dick Tracy comics with a conceptual link to the Sonnets of the New York School poet, Ted Berrigan, paralleling opposed mythos-practices, American Comic Noir and American Transcendentalism.

Faculty Mentor: Kerry Ward, Associate Professor of History
Undergraduate Research Fellow: David Ratnoff ('18)

Project Description: From Slave trading to human trafficking: exploring illicit slave trading in the Indian Ocean during the era of abolition explores British and colonial responses to the long process of abolishing slave trading and slavery in the Indian Ocean during the nineteenth century. By comparing British initiatives to end the slave trade and slavery along the East African coast with what was happening in the Straits Settlements and the South China Sea, I will demonstrate that “slave abolition” in the British empire varied greatly according to location. Whereas the anti-slavery squadron of the British Navy patrolled the East African coast from their base in Cape Town, no similar initiatives took place in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. Attitudes to what constituted slavery changed during the period of legal abolition and the issue of bondage became more complex during this period. I hope to argue that this period was a precursor to the emergence of “human trafficking.” The student-researcher will help Dr. Ward analyze primary sources on illicit and illegal slave trading and slavery cases as well as the debates on abolition and free labor.
Student Role: The student-researcher will go through the online data bases and microfilms of newspapers from southern Africa and Southeast Asia looking for articles on slavery, slave trading, and commentary on abolition. The library is purchasing an online set of British colonial reports on the Straits Settlements and Hong Kong and the student-researcher will also look for reports pertaining to the issue of slavery and forced labor. These sources will reveal that there were different perspectives and vehement debates about the nature of slavery in Africa and Asia as colonial law intersected with customary law in British colonies.

For a list of Past Fellows, click here.
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