Special Collections is accepting applications for First-Year Fellows, a one-year fellowship exclusively available to our fabulous First-Year undergraduates! The program is designed to introduce students to the joys, challenges, and thrills involved in conducting research with primary sources. Limited to just three students, First-Year Fellows provides its scholars with support by pairing each student with a mentor who will guide them through every step of the research process. Successful students will also receive a research award of $2,000! Applications are due on September 8, 2024.
Why should you apply? Because you will get to conduct original research with awesome rare things, be mentored by curatorial staff, and will be able to delight friends and family alike with your fascinating discoveries. Don’t believe me? Well, just watch this short video of Arusa Malik, a Class of 2026 First-Year Fellow, discussing all the cool things she researched from our collections of women’s suffrage and women’s liberation ephemera, like the MCP or male chauvinist pig in soap form!
While you may not be chasing a MCP around the Special Collections Reading Room this academic year, rest assured there are plenty of topics to get your imagination running! Just look at these four intriguing research topics:
Not Lost in TransLati(o)n
Mentor: Paul Espinosa
Love studying Latin and making discoveries? Then use your ever-growing Latin language skills to reveal the content of highly important, but rarely studied rare books held at the historic George Peabody Library. You will get to translate short and interesting Latin texts that date from the Renaissance or later and that have never been translated into English before! See if you can figure out why the books were once considered important, why they fell out of favor, and what we can learn from them today. It is recommended that the applicant has had at least two years of Latin and is comfortable with the grammar.
Encountering the Counterculture
Mentor: Heidi Herr
Be the first researcher of our new and far out collection of ephemera that documents the American counterculture of the 1960s. The collection includes vintage photographs, games, literature, comic books, ephemera promoting the use of LSD, and documents advertising the sensational antics of groups like the Yippies. This collection can support groovy subjects including fashion, literary studies, underground art, drug culture, and food movements, among other fun topics. Can you dig it?
Investigating Early Student Records
Mentor: Brooke Shilling
What did it take to get into Hopkins in 1876 or 1900 or 1930? This project explores the earliest student files from 1876 to 1944 in the records of the Office of the Registrar. The collection contains university applications, letters of recommendation, transcripts or grade cards, and subject exams required for matriculation. These records tell us not only about individuals, but about admissions requirements over time and in various fields, data collection practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the particular experiences and achievements that were valued by faculty and administrators. You can focus on the people, sources, time period, and research questions that interest you. And don’t worry! Your student records are restricted for your lifetime or eighty years from the last date of attendance.
Please feel free to reach out to Heidi Herr if you have any questions about the application process, fellowship expectations, or the research topics!