Research Opportunities: HOUR Program
The Department of History offers the HOUR (History Opportunities for Undergraduate Research) Program for undergraduate students interested in research. In this program, students collaborate with department faculty on their scholarly work.
Each semester, students can apply to assist members of the history faculty who would like help on their research projects. Students in this program will gain valuable research experience working with a variety of historic documents and evidence.
Students can receive either credit or an hourly wage through this program:
- Hourly rate is $15.00. Students who are being paid with department funds, instead of out of an individual professor’s research account, will be limited to payment of up to $450.00 (30 hours) a semester or during the summer (to be determined with a professor). Students may apply for additional research hours pending availability of funds.
- Credit is for HIST 395: Independent Research, providing the student completes a substantial writing assignment based on their research. If you choose this option you must:
- Devise a syllabus with the professor with whom you will be working with
- Register for the course online (please make sure you complete this before the University deadline)
Please contact Jacquilyn Rizzo with any questions, jacquilyn.rizzo@rochester.edu.
Apply
Students can apply online through the online hour application.
If you want to work for a professor that you have not taken a course with, you must also submit a letter of recommendation from a faculty member who has taught you. Letters of recommendations can be sent to the Department of History office or emailed to history.department@rochester.edu.
Opportunities
Structured opportunities for HOUR students are listed below. If you’re interested in a different topic, please feel free to reach out to other faculty members in the department to see if you can get involved with their research. Many of our faculty would be glad to create additional research opportunities that would qualify for the HOUR program.
Rochester Voices: (Im)migration (Professor Ball)
This public history research project to create an Immigration Topic as a part of RCPL Rochester Voices site is centered on immigration and migration history to Rochester between 1850 and 1980. It builds on a collaborative initiative with the Rochester Central Public Library (RCPL) begun in Fall 2021. Duties, 5 to 10 hours weekly, will include helping to collate and curate already identified items from the RCPL local history division and finding additional materials when necessary. The project may be extended into the summer. Student should have strong understanding of immigration history in Rochester and should be comfortable working in archival and newspaper sources. Attention to detail and an ability to work both independently and collaborate are also important traits. Some travel to the public library may be required.
Students must have completed HIST252 or have considerable knowledge about Rochester's immigration history
Program Testimonies
“The HOUR Program is a wonderful opportunity for undergraduate students to immerse themselves in active research projects led by Research 1 faculty members in the University of Rochester's History department. Over the past few years, I have offered a 'Digital Caribbean' project to help me identify possible documents for an ongoing book project on piracy and blackness during the 1680s and 1690s. My research centers on people of African descent, who are often very difficult to locate in records from the seventeenth century. As a result, I cast a wide net and invite students to use their expertise to identify print materials and digital archives that might shed light on Black experiences in colonial Mexico, Jamaica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The students that have taken up this challenge have analyzed English-language sources (such as Calendar of State Papers), report and chronicles by French priests and officials, and Spanish-language correspondence between naval officers and governors throughout the Spanish Caribbean. Some students have even learned paleography (the study of ancient handwriting) to advance this research and their own original projects. Others deploy their skills in database construction to analyze marriage and baptism registers in the language of their choice. I am always stunned by the quality of HOUR students' work and the speed with which they learn to navigate these ever-expanding digital archives. Finally, it's worth noting that in this collaborative program, you (the student) end up shaping much of the future research that will be presented at academic conferences and published in scholarly books and journals. It's a wonderful program." -Pablo Sierra