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How to Apply for a Leopold Fellowship

ApplicationS

The Leopold Fellows undergraduate program honors Professor Richard Leopold, a long-time member of the NU Department of History, by providing a small group of able undergraduate students with an opportunity to engage in genuine historical research. Leopold Fellows will work on current History faculty research projects or course development,  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 will learn how scholars develop arguments out of diverse research materials.  Scroll down to view current faculty research projects and application details.

Each Leopold Fellow receives financial support as a Research Assistant (at $15 per hour, for an average  maximum of 10 hours a week). The program can fund travel or other expenses incurred by Leopold Fellows for their work. If the LF is eligible for the Federal Work-Study program, they may have their LF research hours paid as Work-Study hours; however, if they have another Work-Study job, they can have their fellowship hours paid solely by the CCHS.

The program is OPEN to ALL Northwestern undergraduates, irrespective of school or major. History faculty may nominate students to apply or interested students may apply in response to specific faculty projects. Typically each year a Call for Applications with faculty projects goes out in March and faculty sponsors select their Leopold Fellows by early May. Applicants are asked for the following, sent as one email attachment:

Applications should be sent to Asst. Director Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch at efp@northwestern.edu with the email subject line of “Last name LF application” (e.g. Smith LF application). The deadline for completed applications is usually early April. Receipt of applications will be acknowledged by email. Applicants may be interviwed by faculty in the following weeks. Announcement of successful candidates occurs by early May.

Questions and applications should be addressed to Asst. Director  Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch: efp@northwestern.edu

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2025-2026 Applications & faculty projects

 Application process

Please look over our list of faculty projects below and if interested apply for one or two projects. Undergrads from all schools of NU may apply. History faculty may nominate students to apply or interested students may apply in response to specific faculty projects. In either case, please send in your application in the form of one email attachment with the following information:

Applications should be sent to Asst. Director Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch at efp@northwestern.edu with the email subject line of “Last name LF application” (e.g. Smith LF application). The different elements of the application should be combined in ONE FILE. The deadline for completed applications is Monday, APRIL 7 by 4 p.m. Receipt of applications will be acknowledged by email. Faculty may wish to interview you in the next few weeks. Announcement of successful candidates will occur by early May.

Please note: Leopold Fellows may be dropped from the program, if they fail to work closely with their mentor or cannot carry out the proposed research assignment in a timely and ethical fashion.

Faculty research projects

Kathleen BELEW—Megalodon is Gone: A History of Conspiracy Theory

This project seeks to understand the function of misinformation and conspiracy theory in the recent history of the United States, charting belief in the idea that megalodon is not extinct (when in fact this species went extinct millions of years ago). We will examine the history of sharks, the history of prehistoric life, and the function of conspiracy theory. An ideal research assistant will be independent and creative; comfortable with a wide array of primary source materials; and willing to watch cheesy Shark Week content. This project will also involve require proficiency with finding and assessing scholarly articles on conspiracy theory in a variety of academic disciplines.   Fall, Winter and/or Spring

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Henry BINFORD—Early Black Migrants to the Urban Middle West

I am probing a neglected phase in the urban history of Black Americans.  In the first decades after the Civil War, the great majority of African Americans continued to live in rural areas in the South.  We commonly think of Black people becoming northern and urban as part of the Great Migration of the 1910s and 1920s.  After the war, however, tens of thousands of Black Americans moved to the rapidly growing cities of the Middle West, many coming from the former slave states.  These migrants joined tiny but long-standing communities of Black residents in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, and other regional centers.  In several localities, the increase in numbers and the acquisition of property changed urban geography and politics.  Networking among ambitious Black residents in and between these cities created a substrate for the explosive growth of these centers in the early twentieth century.

This project is an offshoot of my previous work on nineteenth-century Cincinnati and my ongoing interest in poor migrants, Black and White, who started very small businesses in nineteenth-century cities.  I have relevant data and other information from that previous work.  I would like to have help in expanding and exploiting my troves of statistical data, as well as doing library and archival work to further the project. Winter/Spring

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Caitlin FITZ—Women’s Sports in Early America

I’m looking for a Leopold Fellow to help me research the history of women’s sports in early America. Footraces will be our most likely subject, but we’ll be on the lookout for other activities as well: swimming, horse-racing, stoolball, rounders, etc.

Applicants should have a strong background in the humanities or social sciences, as well as an interest in American history from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.  (Our research will define “America” broadly and could ultimately encompass North America and/or the Caribbean.)  Interest in sports, and/or women’s & gender history, is a must!  The Fellow will explore digitized primary source accounts (newspapers, magazines, and other ephemera) and study secondary literature. The Fellow might also help identify materials for my course on women’s sports history.  Research will begin in summer 2025 and likely continue into the upcoming academic year (though the exact dates are flexible). Fellows must be creative problem-solvers who are willing to do needle-in-a-haystack research, encounter dead ends, and pivot to new questions and approaches as necessary. Research will all be in English, and residence in Evanston is not required.

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Sean HANRETTA—Colonialism and Muslim Intellectuals in Africa

This project focuses on the effects of colonialism on Muslims in West Africa from the 1880s to the 1920s. I am interested in the ways Muslims resisted colonialism and how they worked to preserve their religious freedom after resistance failed. The particular focus of this research is on the territory of German Togoland (the Schutzgebiet Togo), including those areas that later became part of Ghana as well as, to a lesser extent, those that became part of the country of Togo. Fellows would read archival documents, identify sources that help reveal interactions between the colonial state and Muslim leaders, and translate or summarize the most important findings. Fellows can then choose a particular theme that they would like to focus on and I will assist them in understanding the necessary context to use these sources to illuminate the theme. That research could lead to an honors thesis or course paper or any other format the fellow chooses. Fellows would work with sources that have been digitized (either by the German government or by the British Library's Endangered Archives Project), that have published, or that are available in Northwestern's special collections.

I am flexible in terms of which quarters fellows work, but they would need to commit to at least two quarters of work. Fellows would need to have a high level of reading knowledge of GERMAN.

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Daniel IMMERWAHR—This Too Shall Burn: America in the Age of Wood

America has historically been rich in trees. As a result, it had for much of its history a thoroughgoingly wooden environment, which caught fire frequently. Daniel Immerwahr is writing a narrative history of how this volatile environment affected key events in American history. Research will be in English and will involve analyzing primary sources, combing through the scholarly literature, and editing prose.  Summer/F/W/S.

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Emily KADENS—Exploring Early Modern English Legal Documents with AI

Millions of pages of documents sit unexplored in archives around the world, documents that could change our understanding of the past. I am interested in investigating how AI can be used to make this material more accessible. My project focuses on 16th- and early 17th-century English court records stored in the National Archives in London. Although these documents contain detailed information about all aspects of English life, they are so challenging to access that too few people use them. My team has already built an AI model to automate the transcription of the difficult script in which the documents were written. The next step, and the one for which I am seeking a Leopold Fellow, is to learn how to most effectively use AI to sort and query a large dataset of court documents to discover how and what the AI can help us learn from them. We will train the Leopold Fellow to read the early modern English script so that they can access the original documents as needed. The Fellow’s main tasks will be to prepare the transcribed documents for the GPT to use; to devise and run AI queries; to experiment with using the AI to tag the transcriptions for names, places, and content; to compare the results generated by different GPT systems; and to check the accuracy of the AI-generated data against the original transcriptions.

Willingness to learn to read old script is important (artists, musicians, and people good at foreign languages often have a particular knack for this). You can look at the script here: https://app.nearpod.com/?pin=FLRDW. Experience with AI tools, digital humanities, geo-mapping, and/or data analysis is also a big plus.

Summer/F/W.

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Rose MIRON—Founding: A New History of Early Chicago

This collaborative research project aims to tell a new history of early Chicago that centers Indigenous voices and experiences, in contrast with the many founding narratives in the city’s built environment that erase or mischaracterize Indigenous influences. Co-authored by Rose Miron (Newberry Library and Northwestern University) and Eric Hemenway (Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Nation), in collaboration with other relevant tribal representatives, the project will reexamine primary sources from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, highlighting Indigenous presence and the role Native communities played in shaping the place we now call Chicago. Since this project is based in deep community collaboration, the focus and sources examined may shift as the project develops. However, research materials will likely include early travel narratives and correspondence of European settlers like Jesuits and fur traders, records related to 18th and 19th century treaties, and secondary sources about Chicago from the 19th and 20th century. The project may also include local travel to and analysis of local public history representations.

While the majority of the research can take place in Chicago, an archival trip to Indiana University would be welcome if time and funding permits. Experience, or willingness to learn about methods in the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies is a must, and an ability to reach French, especially in manuscript materials, would be a bonus but is not required. Since this is a collaborative project with tribes, this is a great fit for anyone looking to learn more about and gain experience in community collaboration. This is an ongoing project, so timing is flexible. Work could begin as early as the summer and extend through the fall, winter, and spring quarters.

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Yohanan PETROVSKY-SHTERN—Behind Bars: Ukrainian and Jewish dissidents in the gulag, 1959-1989 

I am working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled “Behind Bars: Ukrainian and Jewish dissidents in the late USSR.” By “dissidents” I understand a wide range of the representatives of USSR intelligentsia – artists, writers, poets, journalists, engineers, teachers, scholars – who opposed the Soviet regime and sought various ways to reform it. Most of them were actively involved in the national revivalist and human rights movements and most of them ended up in the correction colonies. Two groups of inmates, one of Jewish another of Ukrainian descent, established close relations in the colonies and produced a significant corpus of literary texts about one another. Looking into multiple KGB (state security committee) documents, I am analyzing this counter-intuitive encounter which defied the xenophobic ethno-national stereotypes of both groups, and the way modern-day historians understand nationalism.  

The Leopold Fellow will be reading UKRAINIAN-language memoirs, diaries, other ego-documents of the dissidents of Ukrainian and Jewish origin and helping reconstruct the network of inter-ethnic connections of the human rights activists in the Soviet underground and in the correction colonies, focusing on the period of the Cold War, from the late 1950s through the late 1980s. The Fellow will have taken a couple of courses in history and will be interested in developing critical skills while reading dissident memoirs in the original. All work could be done at home, at the library, and online with a variety of sources, including specially ordered ILL ones. Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring.. 

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Scott SOWERBY— three projects

Project 1 – Absolution and Arms: Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

 My current book project, Absolution and Arms: The Violent Origins of Religious Toleration in Early Modern Europe, examines the experiences of religious minorities in European militaries in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. I focus on moments when rulers tried to bid for the military support of minority groups by offering them religious toleration. One such moment was the late eighteenth century in Ireland. In the late 1770s, British administrators in Dublin, facing crippling troop shortages during the American Revolutionary War, decided to open the British army to Irish Catholics. At the same time, these administrators pressed for a relaxation of the Irish laws that penalized the exercise of the Roman Catholic faith. In so doing, they hoped to earn the loyalty of Irish Catholics and to make young Catholic men more amenable to enlistment in the British army. I am seeking a Leopold Fellow to assist with my research. Over the course of the year, we will examine the experiences of Irish Catholics in the British army. How were they recruited? How were they treated once they were in the army? How did they feel about serving a British government that was widely seen as anti-Catholic? We will also investigate the fearful reactions of many Irish Protestants to the arming of Catholics. Our research will take us through the many English-language newspapers published in Ireland in the late eighteenth century. We will read news articles and editorials as we try to piece together the story of how Irish men and women responded to a pivotal shift in government policy regarding the Roman Catholic faith. I am looking for a fellow who is available for some combination of the following quarters: Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring.

Project 2 – Absolution and Arms: The Waldensians in the Italian Alps, 1650–1730

As part of my current book project on religious toleration in early modern Europe, I am conducting research on a Protestant group called the Waldensians who lived in the mountain valleys of the Piedmont in the early modern period. The Waldensians began as a medieval heretical movement in the twelfth century before joining the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. Most of them were farmers, but they were also skilled in warfare, and their intimate knowledge of the mountain terrain helped them to defend their territory against much larger armies from lower-lying regions. In the seventeenth century, they were persecuted by the Catholic dukes of Savoy, who controlled the Piedmont region from their headquarters in Turin. I am seeking a Leopold Fellow to assist with my research. Together, we will examine the changing relationship between the Waldensians and the dukes of Savoy. In certain periods, the relationship was a bitterly violent one as the two sides fought a succession of wars. At other times, the two sides forged a more cooperative relationship. Some Waldensians even agreed to fight in the armies of the duke of Savoy. We will examine several key moments when the relationship between the two sides changed, seeking to understand why and how these enemies sometimes ended up as allies. I am looking for a fellow who is available for some combination of the following quarters: Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring. Some knowledge of ITALIAN is preferred but not required.

Project 3 – Absolution and Arms: The Lipka Tatar Rebellion of 1672

In addition to the two projects described above, I am also conducting research on the Lipka Tatars of Poland-Lithuania in the early modern period. The Lipka Tatars migrated out of central Asia in the fourteenth century, settling in an area that what was then part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and is now divided between Lithuania, Belarus and Poland. They were largely Muslim and were granted rights to build mosques in exchange for military service. They retained those rights when the Grand Duchy merged with the kingdom of Poland in 1569 to become Poland-Lithuania. In the later seventeenth century, their religious freedoms were greatly reduced by the Polish government. As a result, in 1672, they rebelled. Several thousand Lipka Tatars left for the Ottoman Empire but were persuaded to return by Jan Sobieski of Poland, who offered them the restoration of their religious rights. In 1683, they joined Jan Sobieski’s armies in the Battle of Vienna, when a multi-national force defended the Austrian capital against an Ottoman army under Kara Mustafa. (They were thus Muslims defending a Catholic city against other Muslims.) I am seeking a Leopold Fellow to assist with my research into this episode. We will examine why the Lipka Tatars rebelled, what they hoped to gain from their rebellion, how Jan Sobieski persuaded them to return, and the role they played in Sobieski’s army. I am looking for a fellow who is available for some combination of the following quarters: Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring. Some knowledge of POLISH is preferred but not required.