Professor: Gayle Wald
Department: American Studies
Title: Children’s Musician-Educator Ella Jenkins
Description: I am researching and writing about Ella Jenkins, the most important children’s musician of the 20th century. At 95, Jenkins has released more than 40 albums on the independent Folkways record label. She has won a Grammy and been deemed a “national treasure” and the “first lady of children’s music.” Jenkins wrote liner notes (written texts) to go along with every one of her albums. They are a rich literary archive of her thinking as an African American woman whose career was shaped by civil rights and anti-fascism. I am looking for someone to collect all of these texts and perform a content analysis of them.
Duties: The RA will collect Jenkins’s digitized liner notes (written texts that accompanied each of her albums) and perform a content analysis of them. What are the themes that run through these texts? What turns up as quirky or unusual? How does Jenkins tell a story about herself in these texts? How do her themes change over time?
If you are interested in US cultural history and woman’s and African American history, this will be a fun project. This is a project that will allow you to use skills in literary/ textual /cultural analysis.
Time commitment: 1-3 hours per week (average)
Credit hour option*: 1
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: gwald@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be
met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Brianna
Crayton (bcrayton@gwu.edu) whether they intend to pursue credit or not.
Category: Research Assistant Opportunity
The Famous Ape [Research Assistant]
Professor: Holly Dugan
Department: English
Title: The Famous Ape
Description: My current book project, “The Famous Ape” argues that there is much to learn about our history from studying how we’ve treated our closest animal relatives: apes. In it, I trace the simian celebrities renowned in their own time period for aping our best and worst qualities, many of whom paid dearly for having such skills. My title comes from Hamlet’s odd allusion in that play’s famous closet scene, an allusion that is as confusing as it is intriguing. In it, Hamlet warns his mother not to be “like the famous ape,” who sought “to try conclusions.” Despite Hamlet’s specificity (he uses the definite article) and his conviction that the lessons of this example are well known, no one seems to know a thing about the so-called “famous” ape. Gertrude leaves the scene convinced of Hamlet’s madness, and most critics do, too. My book takes a different approach, addressing that absence directly by seeking to trace the forgotten history of various “famous apes” from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, all of whom were quite well known in their own time, and who were used to “try” conclusions about human and animal boundaries, but who are now mostly forgotten and excluded from our histories of modernity.
Because I’ve found more examples than I can address in the book, I am building a public humanities website to share this information, which is comprised of brief biographies of each “famous ape.” My hope is that in seeing the repetition latent in these histories and by learning more about these creatures as individuals, readers will come to their own ethical conclusions about these entertainment practices.
Duties: All that’s needed is a willingness to learn more about historical research and animal history.
Research tasks may include 1. primary research in newspaper archives of the 19th and 20th century (depending on students’ skills & interest); managing a public-facing humanities research account linked to the project (ie, summarizing research and drafting content for blog posts; strategizing about promotion across platforms; acquiring image rights); building/maintaining research database.
Time commitment: 1-3 hours per week (average)
Credit hour option*: 1
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: hdugan@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be
met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Brianna Crayton at bcrayton@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.
Rebel Group Formation in Sub-Saharan Africa [Research Assistant]
Professor: Janet Lewis
Department: Political Science
Title: Rebel Group Formation in Sub-Saharan Africa
Description: How does armed rebellion start? Answering this question is
critical to understanding how the costly, more violent stages of conflict may
be averted. However, existing evidence about the earliest phases is highly
incomplete, especially for weak states in Sub-Saharan Africa. Rebel groups
that fail early, before committing substantial violence, are usually omitted
since they end before gaining substantial attention in news media. This
project aims to advance knowledge about rebel group formation by building a
dataset of nearly all rebel groups that formed, even minimally so, in
Sub-Saharan Africa since the late 1990s.
Duties: The Research Assistant(s) will work under the supervision of the PI
to build the dataset. This will involve digging for tough-to-find
information, careful reading and analyzing African and international news
sources (mostly newspapers), as well as occasionally identifying and speaking
(via Skype) with African scholars and journalists. The RA will learn a great
deal about political violence, Africa, and the craft of thinking carefully
about how best to analyze complex political issues in remote contexts.
Desired Skills and Qualifications:
• Outstanding research, verbal communication and writing skills
• Detail-oriented and able to work independently
• Ability to read and speak in French is desirable (not required)
• Prior experience living/studying/working in Africa is desirable (not
required)
• Experience building and using quantitative datasets is desirable (not
required)
Please note: there are two openings for this role!
Time commitment: 10 or more hours per week (average)
Credit hour option*: 3
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: janetilewis@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be
met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Brianna Crayton at bcrayton@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.
National Churchill Library and Center Undergraduate Research Fellowships
The National Churchill Library and Center at The George Washington University is pleased to invite applications to the inaugural National Churchill Library and Center Research Undergraduate Fellowship Program for the 2019-2020 academic year. This provides awards to GW undergraduate student researchers and faculty who work on topics of relevance to Winston Churchill’s example of global leadership. This funding will enable faculty-student mentorships to foster further advanced study of Churchill’s leadership and how it applies to the present. Awards will range from $500-$2500 depending on the needs of the project.
Be sure to check this opportunity out if you are interested!
The Lives of East Germans book project
Professor: Mary Beth Stein
Department: RGSLL
Title: The Lives of East Germans book project
Description: My book, The Lives of East Germans, utilizes the life history of interviews of approximately 80 former East Germans in order to analyze when and how people remember and talk about their lives under socialism and how their lives changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. The goal of this book is to provide in-depth narrative examples of the complexity of East German experience through multiple voices and perspectives.
Duties: I would like to hire a student with near native German language skills to transcribe and translate parts of interviews that I conducted in Berlin in Fall 2018. Another task would be to read select Stasi files and compile an index of key terms from the interviews and files.
Time commitment: 4-6 hours per week (average)
Credit hour option: 0
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: mbstein@gwu.edu
International Relations Research Assistant Opportunity!
Graduating seniors in IR!
Professor Scott Sagan (Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)) is seeking an assistant to research and write about international security issues including nuclear weapons policy, public opinion on the use of force, nuclear nonproliferation, and the laws of armed conflict and ethics of war.
If interested in this opportunity, follow this link for info & instructions on how to apply.
Take a Second Look at These Research Assistantships
Looking for ways to round out your fall semester? Interested in getting involved with research at GW? Take a second look at these research assistantships for the fall!
Modern Translatio Imperii [Research Assistantship]
Professor: Christopher Britt Arredondo
Department: RGSLL-Spanish and Latin American Literature
Title: Modern Translatio Imperii
Description: Focused on the various and often contradictory roles that intellectuals played in the transfer of imperial power from Spain to the United States at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this project involves research in the literary and political traditions of Spain, the United States of America, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Research will vary from reconstruction of broad historical contexts to detailed analyses of specific texts: mostly essays, but some fiction as well. Research will be conducted in Spanish and English.
Duties: Meet regularly to discuss research goals and progress. Consult archives in the Hispanic Reading Room at the LOC. Identify, read, and provide written summary, including detailed quotes, of pertinent texts, documents, images.
Time commitment: 4-6 hours per week (average)
Credit hour option*: 2
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: cbritt@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.
Leveraging Education with Students’ Real-World Observations: A Diary Approach [Research Assistantship]
Professor: Tom Geurts
Department: Finance & Real Estate
Title: Leveraging Education with Students’ Real-World Observations: A Diary Approach
Description: Together with colleagues from other universities, I am working on a new educational approach outside of the traditional “Lecturing with Assignments/Exams”. In this approach, students need to keep a Scrapbook where they not only record their classroom notes, but where they can also add observations and articles about the material that is being studied. This can enable a main driver of students’ motivation to learn: curiosity about their own real-world observation. In their scrapbook entries, students describe current real estate issues, projects, or policies which they somehow encountered or read about. It is important that each entry somehow raises student’s wonder, leading him or her to question something, or to explain their observation using theory.
Duties: In order to measure the efficacy of the new approach, we have developed a questionnaire in which the students describe their experience with the Scrapbook method. The Research Assistant will help to analyze the data from the questionnaires. This is ideal for a student interested in pedagogy and/or statistical analysis.
Time commitment: 1-3 hours per week (average)
Credit hour option*: 1
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: TGG@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.
Cellular Phones and Inequality in Washington DC [Research Assistantship]
Professor: Alexander Dent
Department: Anthropology
Title: Cellular Phones and Inequality in Washington DC
Description: In an era in which 95% of American adolescents across socioeconomic status (SES) have a cellular phone, most of which are “smartphones” capable of accessing an array of digital networks, it is tempting to believe that interconnection and access to information have equalized. However, if you dig beneath the surface you find that profound differences exist with respect to access, reliability, and capacities for cell phone use as reflected in lived experience, including schooling and home life. This research proposes to explore how inequality persists in new forms through cellular telephony in Washington DC, a city that has a long history of inequality. In more detail, we seek to test the hypothesis that variations in cell phone practice impact rising inequality in schools and households.
Duties: Doing innovative research on digital technology. In more detail, data collection (interviews, observations, mapping, focus-groups); data analysis (coding, transcription); grant and article writing; brainstorming. We are looking for someone interested in media use, ethnography, and the relationship between theory and data.
Time commitment: 2-8 hours per week
Credit hour option*: 1-3
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: asdent@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.
