SURF Mentoring

Potential projects/topics: Romancing the New World is a book-length study of the relationship between race and genre in American literature form 1689 to 1900. The portion that students would be working on concerns the 1900 novel The House Behind the Cedars, by African-American writer Charles Chesnutt. In surveying the extant research on the text, Chesnutt, and related themes, students will become acquainted with teh scholarly trends in 19th-Century American literary and studies, 19th-century American historical studies, 19th-Century African-American studies, and 19th-century Southern studies.

Potential skills gained: ability to locate humanities research sources in online and offline archives; ability to read said sources and identify the most relevant data; ability to summarize the scholarly trends concerning a given literary or historical topic.

Required qualifications: fluency in English and access to the Internet.

Direct mentor: Faculty/P.I.