Undergraduate Summer Research Internships

The Western Undergraduate Summer Research Internships (USRIs) provide undergraduate students with engaged research experiences under the mentorship of a faculty member and are intended to stimulate undergraduate students’ interest in research through direct exposure and hands-on experiences conducting research. This program seeks to provide undergraduate students with first-hand experience in undertaking an exciting research project under the direction of a qualified faculty mentor/supervisor. Through participation in this program, students gain valuable and high-impact research, technical and professional skills that will help support academic and career development towards their future professional goals.

Information on the USRI program can be obtained on the Faculty of Social Science URSI webpage.

Applications for the Department of History are due March 31, 2023
and must be submitted via email to:

Rebecca Northcott
Undergraduate Program Coordinator
rnorthc2@uwo.ca

Download the USRI Application Form
Matched Stream
Unmatched Stream

To facilitate the unmatched stream, the following faculty members have projects for which they will consider unmatched applications.

Professor	Summer Research Project	In-Person/Hybrid/Online
Professor Cody Groat	A Social History of the Ingersoll Rural Cemetery The Ingersoll Public Library has digitized the Ingersoll Rural Cemetery Burial Registers from 1864- 2019. For this USRI project, a student will have the opportunity to read through these burial registers and create a database of people who were buried in the Potter's Field, an unmarked section that was usually set aside for those with limited financial resources. This database will list their names, date of birth, dates of death, cause of death, and any other information that is recorded. This will be used as part of a broader initiative to have those buried in the Potter's Field properly recognized at the cemetery and will also be used in the preparation of an academic article that considers the lived experiences, ethnicity, and community relations of those who are buried there.	This can be done entirely online but there is also the opportunity to consult the original burial records to confirm the accuracy of the scans and to visit the cemetery. These would both take place in Ingersoll (just outside of London).
Professor Alan MacEachern	Research toward a History of the Meteorological Service of Canada’s Daily Observation Program I’m in the early stage of “Observation Nation,” a book about the Canada’s weather service’s daily observation program from its founding in 1871, & need a student to research what Canadian media & public thought & talked about weather forecasting & meteorological/climatological science. The research will principally involve searching online databases (such as Parl.Canadiana.ca, the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, etc) for keywords related to key concepts and players.	The research could be entirely online but, if the student would appreciate experiencing archival research (or simply having more variety), there is an opportunity for in-person research on the Environment Canada collection at Weldon Library’s ARCC. This balance could be negotiated between the professor and the student.
Professor Bill Turkel	Case Studies in the History of Intelligence Research assistant would help collect and summarize case studies from the history of intelligence and espionage. Hundreds of historical events (e.g., 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, 2002 assessment of WMDs in Iraq, etc.) have traditionally been used to train intelligence officers, policy makers, and strategists about the causes and consequences of intelligence failure. There is no bibliographic reference work that gathers links to the literature on these cases, however (at least not in the open source literature). Outcome of the project would be an open publication with opportunity for student co-authorship.