Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)

Doing a UROP in Literature can give you first-hand experience in how professional literary research and critical thinking and writing get done. You can see how new ideas are seeded and developed through engagement with established perspectives on literary and cultural traditions. Or you can gain experience with revolutionary new uses of digital technology in literary scholarship and teaching.

Literature UROPs often involve library and/or on-line research: tracking down books and articles, reading and preparing notes on specific texts, and discussing these on a regular basis with the supervising faculty member. But there are other kinds of projects to which students have also contributed, including editorial and bibliographic work, translation, and the building and maintenance of electronic archives to support teaching and research. The Literature Faculty welcomes creative ideas for innovative new models of UROP activity.

Some recent UROPs in Literature have involved:

• Collection, uploading, and annotation of digitized images for MetaMedia archives on American authors and United Kingdom authors.
• Participation in the assembly and maintenance of the Shakespeare Electronic Archive
• Archival research on the contemporary literary movement of Magic Realism
• Research and the preparation of an annotated bibliography on nineteenth-century British fiction
• Literary and scientific research in support of a seminar on “British Poetry and the Sciences of Mind”

Students interested in doing a UROP in Literature should initiate direct contact with the faculty member for whom they wish to work.

Students may do UROPs in Literature for pay or course credit. Funding for paid UROP positions usually comes from the UROP office and only occasionally from faculty members’ own sources.