Designed to develop excellent independent researchers, the University Librarian’s Undergraduate Fellowship is a new program targeted at students working on Departmental Honors projects or other comprehensive research projects in art history, classics, comparative literature, and English. Jointly sponsored by the University Librarian and the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the program is funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources. Twenty $500 stipends will be given in the 2009/10 academic year: ten at the beginning of the fall quarter and ten at mid-quarter.
The first ten recipients represent a diverse group of undergraduates with majors ranging from comparative literature to creative writing to English. Their research interests include:
- Victorian and American travel narratives with emphasis on the establishment of cultural identity in an increasingly globalized world
- Severe bullying in teenagers
- Negative posthumous images of Elizabeth I through the plays Henry VIII and The Revenger’s Tragedy
- An exploration of the core concepts of Romanticism
- Chicano theater
- An examination of how visual and literary representations of the Zapotec third-gender identity muxe interrogate and/or reinforce heteronormativity
- Artists’ expressions in literature and the cultural production of writers
- Pulp fiction in American gay and lesbian literature
- Stereopsis and the divisional and unitive possibilities of the human mind
Each recipient will work closely with a faculty member who serves as an advisor and with a librarian mentor to use research library resources, including special collections and archives, to complete his or her project. Conversant with research methodologies, information resources, and information technologies associated with specific disciplines, librarian mentors are ideally positioned to collaborate with faculty to meet the information, reference, and research needs of these students.
Each student’s research project will be presented in a Library program, deposited in the Library’s institutional repository, and made available through the Library’s Web site.
In the coming weeks, I’ll share excerpts from the personal statements the students made in their applications to give you a sense of what they see as the spirit, potential, and promise of this new program. I hope you’ll find them as touching and inspiring as I have!
