Undergraduate Research Assistantships

Research Assistants for 2024-25

The Stanford Humanities Center offers research opportunities for Stanford undergraduates throughout the year. Research Assistants (RA's) work directly with Humanities Center fellows on faculty-led projects and build skills to conduct humanities research. Research opportunities are available during the winter and spring quarters only. The application process calls for a CV and a letter of interest, which should include a list of courses relevant to the project. Please send your application materials directly to the faculty mentor leading the research project. If you have questions, email (sturetsk@stanford.edu) Svetlana Turetskaya, International and Academic Programs Manager. 
 

Research Projects
 

(1) Project Title: Revisiting the Southern Question: South Korea, South Vietnam, and the U.S. South

Faculty Leader: Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Department of Asian American Studies, UCLA/ Stanford Humanities Center External Faculty Fellow, elegandhi@ucla.edu

Project Description: This book project builds on Antonio Gramsci’s 1926 essay, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” to think through discourses of “the south” at three sites often overlooked in Global South studies: South Korea, South Vietnam, and the U.S. South. These three southern spaces are connected not only geopolitically, but also thematically, via notions of southern victimhood, civil war divisions, and militarized migration. The part of the project that the RA would work on concerns Korea’s participation in the Vietnam War on the United States’ behest, and how the memory of that war is continually contested in contemporary Korean society.

URA Responsibilities and Outcomes: The RA will find, read, and summarize English-language and Korean-language academic texts that discuss Korean military participation during the Vietnam War. They will help transcribe the Korean-language portions of oral histories the faculty member conducted in South Korea during December 2022. They will also identify and summarize Korean news sources that discuss the ongoing peace activism movement in South Korea and the court case to consider reparations for Vietnamese victims of Korean military massacres that occurred during the Vietnam War. The RA will meet regularly with the faculty member to discuss research findings and next steps. Korean language skills are necessary. Familiarity or interest in ethnic studies, Global Asias, and/or Korean Studies is a plus. Throughout this project, the RA will gain insight on how to conduct good interdisciplinary, multi-sited research, including how to identify and synthesize primary and secondary sources.     

(2) Project Title: Predictions without Futures: Repetition and Stagnation in Dreams of Artificial Intelligence

Faculty Leader: Sun-ha Hong, Data Science and Communication, UNC Chapel-Hill / Stanford Humanities Center External Faculty Fellow, residual@stanford.edu

Project Description: Technological futures increasingly dominate our collective horizons of the possible, but are themselves regurgitated across generations. Uncannily familiar visions of automatic factories, crime prediction, and robot maids resurface across the decades, keeping us stuck on the same old social and political impasses. Predictions without Futures argues that this cultural repetition - and subsequent amnesia—plays a crucial role for justifying the harms of data-driven systems, as well as foreclosing the horizon of alternative futures into "business as usual." Drawing on critical data studies and STS along with theories of ritual and (dis)belief, the book weaves together technological predictions about the future, and predictions about the future of technology, into a common story about the repetition and stagnation of the social through the mythologization of innovation.

URA Responsibilities and Outcomes: The goal is to identify key themes and patterns in how automated homes and kitchens (including proto-'smart devices') were being imagined and sold, with a focus on mid-20th century U.S. The RA will search magazine archives for relevant articles & adverts, primarily through the Internet Archive’s Computer Magazines collection, and possibly the Stanford Libraries & Computer History Museum archives. (The work can mostly be done remotely, with a few possible trips to Greene Library & CHM archives.) The RA will find material and compose short, informal notes on themes & patterns, calibrating with Prof. Hong in short weekly check-ins. The RA will gain experience in qualitative archival research methods, cultural histories of computing/technology, and a sense of how critical/humanistic research projects are built out of smaller case studies. No special background required, but if the student has language/cultural background in another region, exploration of non-US material is a possibility.

(3) Project Title: War Stories, Typhoon Tales: An Ecological History of the Marianas Archipelago

Faculty Leader: Kristin Oberiano, Department of History, Wesleyan University/Stanford Humanities Center External Faculty Fellow, oberiano@stanford.edu 

Project Description: This project examines the ecological dimension of imperialism, exploring the ramifications of global climate change and militarization on the lives of the Indigenous Chamorro people and Asian migrants in the Marianas archipelago. This project places an emphasis on Indigenous geography and oral tradition that has embedded knowledge of the lands, the sky, seas, the flora, and fauna to propose an alternative form of history narration that is not solely derived from the colonial and institutional archives. By connecting these memories across time (climatic time) and space (the whole Marianas archipelago), this book proposes an alternative perspective of how we come to understand temporality in the discipline of history.

URA Responsibilities and Learning Outcomes: In addition to gaining knowledge of the project’s content, the RA will gain experience in conducting interdisciplinary research within the environmental humanities, including assisting with literature reviews, processing oral histories, and conducting primary source research. The RA will assist in mapping the historiographical trends in relation to the intersection of the environment with humanities frameworks including historical narratives, memory studies, and Indigenous and migration studies. The RA will also gain research skills including processing oral history interviews and archival sources including transcription, notetaking, and tagging. The RA can expect meta-level conversations about crafting historical narratives given historiographical fields and primary sources available for this research project.

(4) Project Title: Salt of the Santos: A History of Devoted Work

Faculty Leader: Paul Ramírez, Department of History, Northwestern University/Stanford Humanities Center External Faculty Fellow, pramirez@northwestern.edu  

Project Description:Salt of the Santos is a book-length study of the production and consumption of salt in Mexico from the early colonial period to the beginning of the twentieth century. Salt was a critical input in the silver refining process, which provided Spain with much of its wealth. Besides this commercial application, what other meanings and values did salt hold for Indigenous communities in Mexico, who remained in control of production for centuries under Spanish rule? The book is a cross-disciplinary study of these meaning, local preferences, and people, drawing on history, archaeology, ethnography, art history, and religious studies to understand the cultural, imperial, institutional, and devotional aspects of salt production, including the ways that rituals and other forms of propitiation and pilgrimage supported the productive activities of Indigenous communities.

URA Responsibilities and Learning Outcomes: The RA would assist in compiling, transcribing, and interpreting an eclectic set of records on the harvest, transport, exchange, and use of salt and on the lives of workers in various regions of Mexico. Responsibilities may include helping to locate traces of salt and devotional practice in archival and printed materials, including court cases, confraternity records, journals and newspapers, works of art and photography, and more. Depending on previous research experience, the RA may assist in producing maps, creating tables, transcribing legal cases, conducting research in local archives, and work with more challenging sources, including Inquisition records and parish databases. The RA would develop critical skills in historical research and interpretation, paleography, data compilation and analysis, and in the use of digital databases. Reading knowledge of Spanish is required.

(5) Project Title:Forging Empire: Mineral Extraction, State-Making, and the Colonization of Ottoman Kurdistan, 1720–1870.

Faculty Leader: Nilay Özok-Gündoğan, Department of History, Florida State University/Stanford Humanities Center External Faculty Fellow, nozokgun@stanford.edu 

Project Description: This project examines how the Ottoman Empire's mineral extraction efforts in its eastern frontier reshaped the region’s socio-economic, political, and ecological landscapes during the early modern period. Focusing on the copper, gold, and silver-rich Keban-Ergani mines, the study explores how the empire’s demand for minerals, particularly in times of war, drove the colonization of predominantly Kurdish and Armenian-populated regions. By analyzing the century-long operation of these mines, the book reveals the Ottoman state’s strategies for incorporating this frontier into its imperial structure through economic exploitation, environmental degradation, and the suppression of local autonomy. The book contributes to global histories of colonialism, proto-industrialization, and environmental history, demonstrating the central role mineral extraction played in the Ottoman Empire’s expansionist policies and the socio-economic transformation of Kurdistan.

RA Responsibilities and Learning Outcomes: The RA will engage in a thorough exploration of the comparative study of colonialism, particularly in the context of mineral extraction and shifting energy regimes. They will develop skills in conducting research using secondary sources, compiling bibliographies, utilizing citation tools, and refining their reading and summarization techniques. Through regular consultation with the faculty member, the RA will learn how to synthesize findings from secondary sources to create an analytical literature review based on a working research question. Additionally, the RA will gain significant knowledge of historical scholarship on comparative colonialisms. A background in humanities is preferred but not required.

(6) Project Title: Andy Warhol’s Guide to Life (Illustrated)

Faculty Leader: Richard Meyer, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University/Stanford Humanities Center Internal Faculty Fellow, meyer1@stanford.edu 

Project Description: The RA will engage in visual and textual research for my new book project, Andy Warhol’s Guide to Life (Illustrated). The book demonstrates how Warhol’s unique sensibility and off-kilter perspective (on art, sex, wealth, celebrity, and shopping, among other things) provide an alternative way to think about everyday life. The everyday life at issue is both Warhol’s and our own.

RA Responsibilities and Learning Outcomes: The RA will do intensive work with Warhol’s published diaries and with the archive of 3,600 photographic contact sheets now held by Stanford.  The RA will work closely with me as the manuscript develops and will do additional research on Warhol’s books, magazines, and interviews. Light e-mail correspondence will also be involved. This position will help the student develop deep research skills with both published and unpublished materials as well as with visual images that have never been reproduced or seen by the public.  The student will participate in a project that experiments with language and visual lay-out and departs from traditional academic styles and constraints.

(7) Project Title:The Politics of Madness & the Madness of Politics in 2024

Faculty Leader: La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Department of American Studies, University of Maryland / Stanford Humanities Center External Faculty Fellow, ljbruce@stanford.edu 

Project Description: This project will investigate how accusations of "madness" are wielded and weaponized in U.S. political discourse in 2024 and what this reflects about broader sociocultural attitudes. Toward this aim, I aim to compile a database detailing how pundits and politicians refer to their political opponents with "mad" terms and epithets: “mad,” "crazy," "unhinged," "insane," "deranged," "unstable," "lunatic," "out of [their] mind," "delusional," "unfit," "sick," and "psychotic," are among these terms. I'm especially interested in the occurrences of these epithets in popular news media between the 2024 Biden-Trump debate (June 27, 2024) and whenever the 2024 U.S. presidential election results are officially certified (hopefully in early November 2024).

RA Responsibilities and Learning Outcomes: The RA will track occurrences of such terms in several mainstream newspapers, magazines, and news programs. The RA will transcribe the sentences where the terms are used and elaborated. In each instance, I'd like the RA to indicate the user of the term, the object of the term, and the discussion context and record time stamps for video footage. The RA should be attentive to the nuances of (political) language, with its abundance of metaphor, analogy, irony, sarcasm, deception, equivocation, double-speak, and so forth. Skill at transcription would be very helpful. This research is an opportunity to learn about the politics of disability and neurodiversity in America and to cultivate cultural competency around disability (especially as it intersects with race, gender, class, and sexuality). This project will help an RA deepen their awareness of the power of pathologizing/pathological speech. More broadly, the RA will sharpen their skills in the close reading of (and close listening to) political rhetoric and discourse. These competencies are essential for socially-engaged scholars.