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Stanford
Public Humanities
School of Humanities and Sciences

Undergraduate Researcher Program

Each summer, Stanford Public Humanities offers several full-time research opportunities for Stanford undergraduates. Working closely with a faculty mentor, students support one of the faculty projects funded by our Humanities Seed Grants. Participants contribute to groundbreaking research in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, while also honing skills that will set them up for a future honors thesis or independent project.

Undergraduate researchers are expected to devote themselves full time—roughly 40 hours per week—to these experiences for 10 weeks during the summer. They receive a base stipend of $8,500, along with a potential financial aid supplement of up to $1,500, depending on need.

Eligibility:

To be eligible, you must meet the following criteria:

  • Student Status:
    • You must be currently enrolled as an undergraduate at Stanford. We do not consider applicants from other universities.
    • Rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors of any major are welcome. However, current seniors who will graduate before summer quarter cannot apply.
    • Students may not be on a Leave of Absence (LOA) while using grant funding. Students who have been on LOA for 3 consecutive quarters prior to the funding period are not eligible (e.g., Autumn, Winter, and Spring).
  • Restrictions on other Summer Activities:
    • You may not accept a second full-time summer stipend from another Stanford program, and you may not work a full-time job during the 10 weeks of your Fellowship. You may participate in a second, part-time research opportunity or part-time job, but we strongly urge you to limit additional commitments to no more than 5–10 hours per week.
    • You may not enroll in any summer quarter courses, with the possible exception of a BOSP Global Seminar (see below).
    • You may not participate in one of Stanford’s intensive summer courses (such as Sophomore College, the Arts Intensive, or a BOSP Global Seminar) while working simultaneously on your project. However, if your faculty mentor allows it, you may be able to arrange the ten weeks of your summer commitment so that they do not overlap with your chosen course. 

How to Apply:

To apply, have a look at the open positions below. If one catches your interest, send an email directly to the faculty member in charge of the project, and he or she will follow up with next steps. Applications will be evaluated on a rolling basis until positions are filled.

Note: You are welcome to apply to multiple positions, but you must notify each faculty member of the other positions you are considering so that we can coordinate offers.

Questions? Email Jeff Schwegman: jschweg [at] stanford.edu (jschweg[at]stanford[dot]edu)


Open Positions

1) Project Title: Intimacy after AI

Faculty Contact: John Willinsky (summer-research [at] ai-intimacy.stanford.edu (summer-research[at]ai-intimacy[dot]stanford[dot]edu))

Project Description: Language technologies have long been sites for the exploration and formation of new intimacies—one of the first chatbots, ELIZA, was presented as an automated therapist; and, of course, people can develop a sense of intimacy with diaries, virtual avatars, and books. Today, large language models (LLMs) extend this history in new directions, backed by massive political economy investments, while being shaped by environmental and labor extraction, infrastructural consolidation, and pornographic exploitation. LLMs are increasingly becoming spaces for intimate experimentation, involving new forms of desire, sexuality, and spirituality. Our project investigates how people engage these technologies as sites for reimagining gender, race, identity, spirituality, and relational life. Using ethnographic methods with participants engaged in this aspect of LLMs, we are tracing the impact of language models on conceptions of intimacy to produce a public archive of these stories. In doing so, we aim to clarify how AI-mediated intimacies contribute to the social fabric of twenty-first century life.

Responsibilities and Learning Outcomes: During the summer, the researcher will:

  • Familiarize themselves with literature about the automation of care and practice techniques for maintaining a library of reading materials.
  • Accompany the team on Bay Area field trips, which may include observing public events, documenting research encounters, and assisting with interviews.
  • Support the development of a public-facing digital archive by helping to organize, annotate, and contextualize collected materials.
  • Practice research writing by producing at least one analytical research memo synthesizing field observations and secondary sources.
  • Potentially contribute to a co-authored academic article or public-facing essay. (This may be published after the summer program)

Skill Preferences: Familiarity with qualitative research methods and ethnography is preferred, but not required.

Location: On-campus is preferred in order to participate in ethnographic field work in the Bay Area, but remote is possible.

 

2) Project Title: Gaming Citizenship: Critical Game Studies, Democracy, and Political Identity

Faculty Contacts: Mark Algee-Hewitt (malgeehe [at] stanford.edu (malgeehe[at]stanford[dot]edu)) and Austin Anderson (aaa1042 [at] stanford.edu (aaa1042[at]stanford[dot]edu))

 Project Description: The new Critical Game Studies Lab in the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis is seeking an undergraduate student to assist in our founding project “Gaming Citizenship”. Video games have become inseparable from contemporary politics and democratic life, yet humanities scholarship has only begun to examine this intersection. Our goal in “Gaming Citizenship” is to explore games as political phenomena. Our new lab undertakes humanistic inquiry into games by combining computational analysis, archival research, and community programming, all of which our undergraduate research assistant will participate in. This will involve collaborative archive research in Stanford's unique game archives (the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection, David Wolinsky Papers, and the Silicon Valley Archives); developing an active partnership with the local organization Gameheads (a Bay Area organization training youth of color in game development); and organizing a major public symposium on the topics of video games, democracy and political identity. The lab will also serve as a collaborative space where faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, game designers, and community members can engage together in the critical study and close playing of games. 

Responsibilities: During the summer, the researcher will:

  • Assist with lab setup at CESTA including developing and documenting research protocols for analyzing games.
  • Conduct archival research using Stanford’s game-related collections (the Cabrinety Collection, Wolinsky Papers, and Silicon Valley Archives) and material to be purchased over the course of the grant.
  • Identify materials relevant to the project’s questions about gaming culture, identity, and democratic participation.
  • Support computational analysis of game texts and archives under the supervision of the PI and Co-Investigator. The researcher will gain hands-on experience with game studies and digital humanities methods.
  • Contribute to planning and logistics for the inaugural Gameheads workshop at Stanford including coordination with community partners.
  • Assist with event coordination at the lab.

Required Skills: None, but some experience with archival research is preferred.

Location: On campus (no remote work).

3) Project Title: Cosmology, Art & AI: fathoming the unfathomable through large-scale astronomical data and public art

Faculty Contact: Camille Utterback (camilleu [at] stanford.edu (camilleu[at]stanford[dot]edu))

Project Description: With our current ability to study the world through massive data sets and AI tools, what is lost of our ability to viscerally apprehend and experience that information, to let it shape our sense of ourselves? What does it mean to work with data at scales we cannot physically experience, that we need machine learning tools to meaningfully parse? Our interdisciplinary team of an artist, astrophysicist, and software developer is looking for a student artist-designer, and/or computer scientist, and/or astrophysicist to help us develop human-computer interfaces and public-facing data visualizations at the intersection of art, astrophysics, and the limits of our perception. Specifically, we will be developing live visual animations based on the 20 terabytes of astronomical data streaming nightly from the world’s largest digital astronomy camera at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory via the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which is just starting a 10-year survey. To create our animations, we will develop a set of open-source Python software interfaces to access the AI “alert streams” which various research groups are developing to parse the nightly data from the LSST. Some of our live animations will be developed to project onto the glass panels of Camille Utterback’s “Fathom” artwork in Stanford’s CoDa building. We will also fine tune, test, and release our Python interface tools to a wider artistic and educational community for their expanded use exploring similar questions of scale, aesthetics and understanding.

Duration and Hours: This is a part-time job of 8-10 hours per week for summer 2026 plus the upcoming academic year (fall, winter, spring). 

Research Responsibilities and Learning Outcomes: The student researcher will develop hands-on experience developing, testing, and implementing open-source software tools that will be used by artists working with large-scale streaming scientific data. Depending on the student’s interest and skill set, this position also provides the opportunity to directly develop artistic visualizations of complex data, and to see the student’s visual work incorporated into a large-scale public-facing artwork. The student researcher will assist in a variety of tasks including: 

  • preliminary research on existing open-source interfaces to complex scientific data streams
  • preliminary research on artworks incorporating live scientific or other large data sets
  • primary work developing software interfaces (using Python) to connect specific AI alert streams from the streaming LSST data to artistic visual output
  • primary work with Associate Professor of Art & Art History, Camille Utterback, and developer, Charlotte McElwain, prototyping visualizations and artistic representations of sky survey data.
  • occasional work with Professor of Physics and of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, Risa Wechsler, and postdocs on her team to conceptualize and evaluate the scientific aspects of the visualizations
  • testing and evaluating animations to incorporate into Utterback’s Fathom artwork in the CoDa building
  • developing open source software to bridge scientific research and artistic uses of data
  • user-testing and help documenting the developed open-source tools in preparation for releasing these to the public

Required Skills:

  • Python development experience is required (this is how we will build the interfaces with the LSST data)
  • experience working with or developing computer graphics, particularly using GLSL is strongly desired
  • experience using graphics applications like TouchDesigner, Blender, Unity, etc., is strongly desired (Utterback’s CoDa artwork is developed in TouchDesigner and the LSST data is 3-dimensional)
  • artistic or design experience is strongly desired
  • experience developing scientific visualizations is also helpful

Location: Summer 2026 work can be performed remotely if needed, though on campus is preferred if possible. Fall, winter, and spring quarter of AY26-27 work will be located on campus

Compensation: This position will be compensated differently than the usual Public Humanities Undergraduate Researcher grants because it is a part-time role lasting from summer 2026 through spring 2027. During the academic year (fall, winter, spring) the position is a part-time student job paying $21 per hour for up to 10 hours per week. During summer 2026 it may be structured similarly, or it may come with a lump-sum stipend of $2,100, depending on whether you are enrolled in courses.