The program provides a small group of able undergraduate students with an opportunity to engage in genuine historical research. Leopold Fellows work on current faculty research projects, learning how to interpret archival and documentary materials. Successful candidates should demonstrate an interest in learning how to interpret complex primary data. Working under the guidance of a member of the Department of History, the Leopold Fellow learns how scholars develop arguments out of diverse research materials.  

Each Leopold Fellow receives financial support as a Research Assistant ($9 per hour for a possible average of 8-10 hours a week). The program should not be confused with Work-Study. Financial need is not considered in the selection process. The program also funds travel or other expenses incurred by the Leopold Fellows.

Students apply to be Leopold Fellows for two or three quarters, which may include the summer quarter. The Leopold Fellows meet formally as a group once a quarter to discuss their experiences. At the end of their fellowship they write a short report on their research.

The first Leopold Fellows started work in 2008-2009. Due to the extraordinary response (32 applications for 10 research projects) and thanks to the generosity of Leopold donors, the History Department, and the Office of the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education, in this inaugural year we were able to support 10 Leopold Fellows. The first ever group of Leopold Fellows and their mentors met on June 2 at a celebratory lunch in the Allen Center. The Fellows attended an archival research workshop conducted by librarian Janet Olson from the University Archives on Oct. 15. At a December 3 lunch during Reading Week three Leopold Fellows spoke about their Fall projects to the whole group of Fellows and mentors.

CHS Director Timothy Breen presents the Leopold Fellows with copies of the biography, Straddling Two Worlds: The Jewish-American Journey of Professor  Richard W. Leopold  by NU alumnus and lecturer Steven J. Harper, at the end

of the Fall quarter (December 3, 2008) lunch meeting attended by the Leopold Fellows, their faculty mentors, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education, Ronald Braeutigam, his assistant Christopher Hayden, and NU archival librarian Janet Olson.

 

 

  Laura Colee, the first alumna of the Leopold Fellowship program, reports on her 

  research findings at the Fall quarter meeting. She had been working through the

  summer and Fall on 17-century British millenarian pamphlets relating to the Jewish

  messianic movement of Sabbatai Sevi in Ottoman Turkey.

  Kate Stephensen and Jack Neubauer also presented their research to critical acclaim of

  their peers and faculty sponsors.

 

 

At the Winter quarter lunch meeting of the Leopold Fellows Professor Josef Barton spoke about his work with Marcela Castillo, who was away doing archival research for him in California, while our student presenters were Jasmine Nazek and Cristina Burack, both of whom were working on challenging materials in foreign languages (Italian and German respectively).

At the Spring quarter lunch Asst. Director Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch and and archival librarian Janet Olson listen with interest to Leopold Fellows talking about their research.

2008-2009 LEOPOLD FELLOWS and FACULTY projects
Note: More detailed descriptions of the projects and the research of the Leopold Fellow can be found HERE.

1. Cristina BURACK (senior) working winter/spring 2009 with Professor Benjamin Frommer on Czechs and Czechoslovakia in the German narrative of suffering before and after World War II;

2. Marcela CASTILLO (senior) working winter/spring 2009 with Professor Josef Barton on Mexican rural women and the reconstruction of community in Northern Mexico and the Southwestern U.S. between 1880 and 1930;

3. Laura COLEE (senior) working summer/Fall 2008 with Professor Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern on the reaction of the western world to the rise of the Jewish messianic movement called Sabbateanism;

4. Stephanie DeNOTTO (junior) working winter/spring 2009 with Professor Robert Lerner on an edition of letters written by and to the noted medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz (1895-1963);

5. Margaret DONNELLY (junior) working winter/spring 2009 with Professor T.H. Breen (originally

Prof. Sarah Pearsall) on colonial America at the onset of the Revolution;

6. Julia HOTOPP (senior) working Fall 2008/winter 2009) with Professor Henry Binford on small businesses in poor urban communities in Chicago and Cincinnati (from 1860 onwards);

7. Huiju JEON (sophomore) working all three quarters of 2008-2009) with Professor Ji-Yeon Yuh on South Korean attitudes toward overseas ethnic Koreans, particularly Korean Americans, resident Koreans in Japan, and ethnic Koreans in China;

8. Jasmine NAZEK (junior) working all three quarters of 2008-2009 with Professor Edward Muir on skepticism in early modern Venice on the basis of the Academy of the Unknowns, a debating society whose members published hundreds of books and pamphlets over a thirty year period in the early 17th C.;

9. Jack NEUBAUER (junior) working all three quarters with Professor Michael Sherry on a book project on prisons and the punitive turn in American life from the 1970s onwards;

10. Kate STEPHENSEN (sophomore) working Fall 2008/winter 2009 with Professor T.H. Breen on colonial unrest and vigilante groups in towns of coastal Maine in the run-up to the American Revolution.

Janet Olson tells the Leopold Fellows about archival research and some Leopold Fellows model their new T-shirts

reading "I found it in the Northwestern University Archives" (Oct. 15, 2008)