Apply to Assist a Project
Undergraduate and graduate students are invited to apply to assist projects accepted into this year's Rice Feminist Seminar beginning in spring 2021. Applications consist of a curriculum vitae and cover letter detailing your interests and relevant experience, uploaded through the application form linked below. If multiple projects are of interest, please rank them in the cover letter. Undergraduate applicants, please specify whether you want independent study course credit or a stipend; graduate students will receive a stipend. Applications are due by close of business, Friday, December 18, 2020.
RFS Project Assistant Application Form
Project Descriptions
There are five projects this year. You'll find a brief project and job descriptions below for each, including an indication of whether projects are open to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Anti-Lynching Counter Archive
Virginia Thomas - UG/Grad
PROJECT: The "Anti-Lynching Counter Archive" is an immersive, multi-sensorial archival experience. Through analogue and digital exhibits, and through events with artists, performers, archival objects, scholars, and activists, the project practices Black feminist wake-work that defamiliarizes and disorients normative affective responses to racial trauma.
JOB: Students could participate in this project by researching content for exhibits, contributing to exhibit curation, and assisting with event development and execution.
Homing
Helena Michie - UG/Grad
PROJECT: "Homing" is a linked blog and full-length book project that chronicles the relation of Hurricane Harvey and COVID to ideas about home, domesticity, and gender. To read the blog, visit: https://www.hominghelenamichie.com/.
JOB: Students could participate in this project in two ways. Given COVID, one part of the work would be online research about Houston’s history of flooding and disaster relief. The second part involves (socially distanced) walking and mapping Brays Bayou, the body of water that flooded my home and thousands of others during Harvey. Students will be asked to help with creating a new and somewhat unconventional map of words and images. I am especially interested in working with students who have skills in areas of mapping and computer and/or other graphics, but am happy to think in a more low-tech way.
The Reservation Project, 1908-1917
Brian Riedel - UG/Grad
PROJECT: "The Reservation Project" documents the impact of Houston's formal redlight district on place where it was established – the Black neighborhood known as Freedmantown – and the people who lived there. To learn more, visit the project proof of concept on StoryMaps.
JOB: Students could participate in this project by helping to collect and collate primary real estate records in the Harris County Archives, located at 11525 Todd St, Houston, TX 77055. Estimated work would be 3 hours each week for the 16 weeks of the spring semester to collect records in the archive. Read straightforwardly, real estate records track property relationships; read across the grain of the archive, they also reveal additional information about Black property owners for whom we may have few other records.
Animals and Ecologies of War in Contemporary African and Latin American Literature
Sophie Esch - Grad Only
PROJECT: "Animals and Ecologies of War" is a book-length study that explores the interrelation of humans, animals, and war in modern literature from Africa and Latin America.
JOB: Graduate Students could participate in this project by helping to edit and proofread two of the sample chapters before they are sent to university presses together with a book proposal.
Race-Making Across the Medieval/Modern Divide
Emily Houlik-Ritchey - Grad Only
PROJECT: "Race-Making Across the Medieval/Modern Divide" is a collaborative, class-based, public-facing archive project. Through a Curated Digital Archive, students in the class (slated for AY 21-22) will study and showcase how the “medieval” has been used both to enable and resist racist thinking over time.
JOB: Graduate Students could participate in this project as planning assistants for the undergraduate course, "Race-Making Across the Medieval/Modern Divide." Work would take place over spring 2021 and likely stretch into summer 2021.