Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program

Unit: Department of Psychology

Faculty lead: Jennifer Beer

Meeting time: Friday 9–10 AM

About the project:
This cohort will explore the theme of Why Do People Feel Most Authentic When They Betray Their True Nature? Weekly activities will consist of a team meeting, reading background literature, and data collection with human participants on a psychological study in the SEAY building. In August 2025, specific data collection hours will be assigned to each URAP cohort member, and attendance is expected each week throughout the semester. Team meetings will include discussions about scientific design in psychology, the use of computational modeling and observation instead of self-report, relevant background literature in psychology, statistical analyses, lessons on problems with science media, and a session on graduate school selection and applications. Data collection will involve running human participants through experimental procedures in Dr. Beer’s lab. Ultimately, students will develop a group presentation (poster with accompanying oral presentation) on the purpose, hypotheses, and statistical analyses of the data collection project.

Students who participate in this research opportunity can expect to learn (1) rigorous scientific design and how to address design concerns when working with human participants (e.g., why use computational modeling rather than just asking people what they are thinking, why is random assignment important, etc.), (2) the psychology background literature on why current research finds that people don’t realize it but they report feeling most authentic when they conform to societal norms rather than when they express their true nature, and (3) how to evaluate whether media write ups of scientific research actually match what was concluded by the scientists who conducted the research (e.g., in a peer-reviewed journal article). Furthermore, data collection will require coordination among the cohort and will provide a firsthand experience of how research teams operate. Students who have acquired these types of experiences are typically highly competitive for advanced research opportunities and well prepared to take on individual thesis projects. Finally, we will hold a session on how to decide on graduate training programs, how to select schools to apply to, and the application/interview process.

About the faculty lead:
Dr. Jennifer Beer is a Full Professor in the Psychology Department with a courtesy appointment at Dell Med Psychiatry. Her expertise is on self-representation and human social interaction; she draws on psychology, communication, neuroscience, and computational modeling in her research and training. Dr. Beer has mentored research assistant cohorts of 3–12 students each year and several undergraduate theses since joining UT Austin in 2007. She also previously mentored a URAP group cohort in Fall 2023. Many of her previous undergraduate research assistants have gone on to pursue advanced research experiences, honor theses, and graduate degrees in research-oriented disciplines. She has also published with previous undergraduate research assistants in peer-reviewed scientific journals. 

Unit: Department of French & Italian

Faculty leads: Paola Bonifazio & Valerie McGuire

Meeting time: Wednesday 2–3 PM

About the project:
Students in this cohort will learn how to plan for and conduct oral history projects. They will learn about the experiences of Italian immigrants in Texas and deepen their understanding of the state’s history.

During the summer, Dr. Bonifazio and Dr. McGuire will set up a list of contacts that students in the cohort will use to recruit interviewees. In late-August/early-September, students will meet once a week with the graduate student mentor to (1) establish contact and create a list of interviewees, including a schedule of interviews; and (2) design questions based on the prospectus provided by the professors. Each student will be assigned to a different area in Texas: North Dallas/Montague County; Bryan/Brazos County; or Galveston/Jefferson County. Students will work independently to recruit 8–10 interviewees and prepare a list of questions to be later shared with the group. In mid-September, students will discuss as a group and with the professors the list of questions that they have prepared, to come up with one final draft to be used during all interviews across the cohort. The students will work on recording interviews from mid-September to mid-October/early-November, at which point they will have a second meeting with the professors to discuss their work. The graduate student will be present during all interviews to help.

The last month of the program will be devoted to cataloguing the video materials collected and working on the final project. The end-goal of this cohort is to create an online depository for the interviews, providing primary sources to historians interested in the ethnic experience of Italian immigrants in Texas.

About the faculty leads:
Dr. Paola Bonifazio is a Professor of Italian Studies. Dr. Bonifazio is currently working on a research project that examines habits of cultural consumptions among Italian immigrants in Texas, including movie going and reading of Italian language press. Her research interests are in film and media history, gender studies, and cultural studies. She has extensive experience in working with archival sources, including oral testimonies.

Dr. Valerie McGuire is an Associate Professor of Instruction of Italian Studies. Dr. McGuire has experience with the collection and analysis of oral histories; these were used for her first book, Italy’s Sea (Liverpool University Press, 2020). She is familiar with the ethical issues raised by collecting data from human subjects and the process for obtaining approval from the International Review Board (IRB). She is currently working on a research project that examines the history of Italian immigration to Texas with a focus on ecological narratives, extending to the introduction of Italian viticulture and farming and food practices, including dairy production and gastronomy.  Her research interests are in modern Italian history and culture, postcolonial studies, Mediterranean Studies.

Unit: Department of Classics

Faculty lead: Naomi T. Campa

Meeting time: Monday 3–4 PM

About the project:
This cohort will have the opportunity to participate in the early stages of a large digital humanities project. They will see firsthand how the foundations are laid for large projects, gain experience conducting a literature review, and learn about metadata. In general, the cohort will gain an understanding of the early stages of research (posing a question, learning about the state of the question, and developing a plan).

Students will be tasked with conducting a literature review on the categorization of ancient and modern migrants in different disciplinary fields. They will be guided on how to do a literature review and receive an introduction to a digital humanities project on ancient migration. Students will be expected to be present in person for the weekly check-in and to meet regular deadlines. By the end of the semester, all cohort members will have completed the literature review, and will then propose an idea of how that might be converted into metadata when gathering ancient examples for the digital database.

About the faculty lead:
Dr. Naomi T. Campa is an assistant professor of Classics. She is an ancient Greek historian and political theorist who has published on ancient democracy, civic status, and migration. Her first book, Freedom and Power in Classical Athens, develops a historically-situated understanding of freedom in order to illuminate the effects of democratic values on the state and the individual within it. She is currently working on creating an accessible database of Greek migration in the Classical period so that researchers, students, and the general public alike can gain a deeper understanding of migration in the ancient world.

Unit: Department of Anthropology

Faculty lead: R. Alan Covey

Meeting time: Tuesday 11 AM – 12 PM

About the project:
Archaeologists have rarely been able to collect data at an urban scale, due to issues of site preservation and the logistics of fieldwork. The Huánuco Pampa project offers a unique opportunity to bring different skills to the study of Inca city life.

The research project will begin with a brief introduction to the Inca Empire and the study of Andean urbanism, followed by an orientation to the Huánuco Pampa research, including how data were collected and archived. Once students are prepared, they will work individually with project databases and archives to prepare an archaeological overview of one or more excavated buildings at Huánuco Pampa. This will involve reviewing and curating images from fieldwork and laboratory analysis, editing field drawings, and working with compiled data (architectural, ceramic, lithic, etc.) to describe the material evidence from each building. Individual work can be tailored to existing skills or areas where students would like to develop new ones. Although most students will focus on learning to synthesize and write up data, there are also opportunities for applying existing skillsets in GIS, statistical analysis, and software for editing and producing images (Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator).

Students will be encouraged to work in the Andean Archaeology Lab, which has two workspaces. The research team will meet weekly for individual updates and to field questions about the research process.

A general goal of the project will be for each student to produce one or more excavation summaries from buildings at Huánuco Pampa, part of the eventual production of a research monograph in which they would be credited for their work. Depending on the area of emphasis and success of the work, there are areas where student work could become part of a peer-reviewed, multi-author journal article that compares different site areas. Some possibilities include (1) comparing the intensity of occupation in lower-status residences, compared to the central state political and religious complexes; (2) describing the use of the city’s storage complex; and (3) using GIS to compare the scales of interaction related to plaza spaces of different size across the city. For students interested in thesis work related to archaeology or anthropology, there are possible next-stage projects that could be developed.

About the faculty lead:
Trained as an archaeologist and ethnohistorian, Professor Covey has worked in the Andes since 1996, conducting survey and excavation work in the Cuzco region (capital of the Inca Empire) and several Inca provinces, including the central highlands, Lake Titicaca Basin, and Atacama Desert. He has worked with the excavation data and archives from Dr. Craig Morris’ excavations at Huánuco Pampa—the most extensive Inca project at the time, at the best-preserved highland provincial capital. Following Morris’ death in 2006, he has been directing the analysis and publication of project data, developing a comprehensive thematic review of colonial chronicles (e.g., on palaces, city layout, women’s enclosures) and excavation results in corresponding parts of the Inca city.  As the project moves to the study of small state complexes and the houses of ordinary people, Professor Covey is prepared to direct the research cohort as students curate archival material and assemble and analyze data from individual buildings and small compounds.

Unit: Innovations for Peace and Development Lab (IPD)

Faculty leads: Mike Findley & Dan Nielson

Meeting time: Tuesday 4–5 PM

About the project:
The IPD-URAP cohort will be provided with on-campus experiential learning, applied training, and professional opportunities to empower students to fulfill UT’s motto of “What Starts Here Changes the World”. Specifically, our cohort will engage with the Government Responsiveness Team, a research group that is conducting an experiment measuring government discrimination across multiple countries. Students will (1) learn and deploy skills in experimental design and analysis; (2) engage with concepts of democracy, civic obligation, and governance; and (3) develop an understanding of the complexities of social science research.

Students will learn about research approaches in social science, research ethics, and research methods through curated readings, data collection, and data analysis. The cohort program will consist of the following activities: (1) weekly graduate student-facilitated group discussion of curated readings, (2) monthly IPD All-Hands meetings, and (3) hands-on workshop sessions on a weekly basis with research tasks to be completed by the next session. Our proposed format is designed to nurture and challenge URAP undergraduates as they have their first experience with academic research. This format will ensure that students gain a foundational understanding of political science research, establish the importance of ethics in research, and provide hands-on experience in conducting research and analysis. We designed our approach to facilitate collaboration among the URAP students while receiving individual mentorship and guidance from faculty and graduate students. Our cohort program will enable students to make meaningful contributions to a transnational investigation of bias in local and national governments, propose their own collaborative research projects, and confidently pursue research in international politics and international development among other disciplines.

At the end of their URAP semester, our cohort members will (1) have a better understanding of political science research; (2) have meaningful hands-on experience conducting research, coding, and completing analysis via data analytical software and programming languages, such as R; and (3) be in position to successfully apply to the Individual URAP, and take these skills beyond the cohort experience.

About the faculty leads:
Drs. Findley and Nielson have led several URAP cohorts in the past and are eager to provide students with another semester of research opportunities and mentoring. Dr. Nielson is co-directing the IPD lab, a student-focused research lab that provides mentored opportunities for interdisciplinary, policy-relevant research on global conflict and peacebuilding, foreign aid, and poverty alleviation. The IPD team represents multiple disciplines and will provide a diversity of perspectives to the cohort selected to join our team. IPD’s participation with URAP is a measurable success, with IPD-URAP students now co-authoring papers to be submitted to top academic journals and others starting research-focused graduate degrees.

Unit: Latino Research Institute (LRI)

Faculty lead: Michael Hames-Garcia

Meeting time: Wednesday 4–5 PM

About the project:
This apprenticeship offers students the opportunity to contribute to original research products using interview data collected by the Community Oversight Lab (COL) from 2020 to 2025 in Oregon, California, and Texas. COL studies the attitudes, motivations, and experiences of people engaged with overseeing local law enforcement either formally or informally. Our research draws from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with officials (independent auditors, internal affairs investigators, city bureaucrats, and local politicians), volunteers (police commissioners and review board members), and other members of the community (activists, attorneys, and journalists) who participate in community oversight of police and sheriff’s departments. We are also planning an Austin Youth Safety Project which will be a participatory action research project that will collaborate with youth in five Austin ZIP codes to document what makes them feel safe or unsafe in their families, neighborhoods, and communities.

URAP participants can choose from two options: (1) anonymizing and editing transcripts for inclusion in book of collected interviews, or (2) helping prepare the launch of the Austin Youth Safety Project (currently anticipated to begin in spring 2026). Students participating in this cohort will gain certification to work with confidential human subject data. Depending on what project they are interested in, they will gain skills related to manual and software-based coding of qualitative data, editing of transcripts in MS Word 365 Online, qualitative research study design, academic writing for publication, working with interview participants to document informed consent, survey design, and community-based participatory research. Students will meet weekly with the project PI and graduate student assistant, working together and independently. They will also be asked to attend research skill workshops throughout the Fall alongside other undergraduate researchers at the Latino Research Institute. They will work closely with the faculty lead to ensure opportunities to ask questions and feel a sense of ownership for the lab’s research products (i.e., publications).

Over the semester, the cohort of students will prepare an independent presentation resulting from their collaborative research. Their contributions to COL’s research products will be credited, sometimes including credited co-authorship depending on the degree and significance of their work (past LRI-URAP students have co-authored studies now under review or soon to be submitted for review for publication).

About the faculty lead:
Dr. Michael Hames-Garcia (Mexican American and Latino Studies) studies inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability in the criminal justice system from policing and criminal courts to incarceration and reentry. From 2019 until 2022, he served as a member of the City of Eugene's Civilian Review Board (which reviews investigations into allegations of misconduct and uses of force by the Eugene Police Department). He also served on the Eugene Police Commission in 2022.

Unit: Department of English

Faculty lead: Geraldine Heng

Meeting time: Tuesday 5–6 PM

About the project:
A Database of White Supremacist Medieval Propaganda is a digital humanities project that collects, digitizes, and makes term-searchable white supremacist/white nationalist documents and art authored by supremacist groups who coopt and deploy the literatures, artifacts, and art (i.e., the expressive and material culture) of the European Middle Ages for purposes of hate and division.

This project is currently supported by medievalists specializing in literature, history, art history, and digital humanities across the country, including Dr. Roland Betancourt, a 2023 Guggenheim fellow and Professor at the University of California, and Dr. Dorothy Kim, a specialist in antisemitism and digital humanities, who has been on the front lines of critical engagement with white extremists. Campus constituencies at UT that will benefit from the creation of this database—for purposes of teaching, research, and many possible projects—include: the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies; the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Social Justice; the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies; the Department of Women’s Studies; and any and all literature, language, history, and area-studies programs and departments where social movements, propaganda, civil society, and media are studied.

Most immediately, this project is a resource for researchers and teachers to study white supremacist rhetoric that utilizes premodern references, without requiring navigation of unannotated difficult materials and dangerous online spaces. This is an urgently necessary tool given the increase in white nationalist use of the past to justify violent acts, as well as the development of the “Aryan Archive”, a white nationalist project under construction that announces the following goal: “[growing] it into a full-blown online university offering rigorous courses with demanding instructors, as well as a self-publishing/content creation platform, where like-minded Aryans can collaborate with each other and gain the funding to create family- and White-friendly information and entertainment content”. Through participation, learning, and engagement, students will develop important research skills while constructively and critically engaging with dangerous ideologies that threaten civil society nationally and locally.

This apprenticeship will provide students the opportunity to engage in both traditional and digital scholarship. The first month of the semester-long program will consist of topic-familiarization, digital tools training, and individual assignment development. The cohort will spend the first two meetings discussing the context that informs the project, goals for the semester, and students’ research interests (both topic-specific and general). With aid from the Scholars Lab on campus, the graduate student mentor will introduce and train students to use Scalar—a free, open-source digital platform developed by a consortium at the University of Southern California—for publishing digital scholarship. Using Scalar, students will develop platform management and design skills without having to learn coding languages. As a team, students will gain essential skills in developing ideas, problem solving, and executing complex research tasks.

In addition to project-specific tasks, students will be encouraged and supported to begin developing their own proposals for a digital research project. These individual research engagements will include, but are not limited to: (1) primary source acquisition, analysis, digitization, and annotation; (2) secondary source acquisition and synthesis; (3) functional and aesthetic website design; and (4) training and use of TimelineJS.

The end-of-semester outcome will be twofold: (1) a team-constructed grant proposal for further development of the project, targeting external sources of funding, and (2) each student will have the option to present a short conference-style paper based on a selection of the project’s data sources or submit a project proposal for their own digital scholarship.

About the faculty lead:
Dr. Geraldine Heng is Mildred Hajek Vacek and John Roman Vacek Chair in English and Comparative Literature, and cross-appointed to/an affiliate of: Middle Eastern studies, Women’s studies, Jewish Studies, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Social Justice. Dr. Heng is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Medieval Academy of America. Her pioneering research on premodern race and the global Middle Ages has culminated in six field-changing books, numerous articles, and the digital platform: the Global Middle Ages Projects (G-MAP). G-MAP is an ambitious effort by an international collaboration of scholars to see the world whole, c. 500 to 1500 CE, delivering the stories of lives, objects, and actions in dynamic interrelationship and change across deep time. Dr. Heng also edits a University of Pennsylvania Press series on race, and a Cambridge University Press series in early global studies. Her expertise will inform various aspects of the project and real-world guidance for students interested in pursuing research in the future.

Unit: Texas English Linguistics Lab (TELL)

Faculty lead: Lars Hinrichs

Meeting time: Thursday 11 AM – 12 PM

About the project:
In this cohort, students will perform research with the Texas English Linguistics Lab (TELL), which conducts linguistic research on Texas English. Students will contribute to research that attracts a considerable amount of public interest. Each student will follow their own individual path of methodological learning. They will become familiar with research methods and concrete skills in data analysis and interpretation skills, including (1) data management, wrangling, and cleaning; (2) discourse analytical coding and presentation using tools such as AVAnnotate; and (3) use of digital tools for data analysis and presentation, such as GIS software, or statistical tools, such as Tableau, R, or Python.

During the semester, students in the cohort will have the opportunity of discussing and developing individual research projects in collaboration with the faculty lead. Students will meet for one hour each week with the graduate student mentor and faculty lead. Between meetings, students will work on individual research assignments while maintaining communication with the faculty lead and/or the grad student mentor via email, Zoom, or in person. As a research team, the cohort will participate in undergraduate research events at UT. In addition, the cohort will participate in two events chosen to foster academic socialization (e.g., attending a conference, visiting a research center, hosting a guest speaker, or others). All members of the cohort will create a final project and participate in the end-of-semester research presentation and celebration event.

About the faculty lead:
Associate Professor in the Department of English, Lars Hinrichs, Ph.D., is a linguist who specializes in varieties of English and language variation and change. Dr. Hinrichs uses and develops both quantitative and qualitative methods to study language data. Since 2024, he has been part of a team of faculty members developing a new bachelor’s degree in Data Science with a specialization in the humanities. To learn more about Dr. Lars Hinrichs, the Texas English Linguistics Lab, and the type of research this cohort will be concerned with, please visit Dr. Hinrich’s research website at www.texasenglish.org or personal website at www.larshinrichs.site.

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Unit: Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis (IUPRA)

Faculty leads: Yasmiyn Irizarry & Kevin Thomas

Meeting time: Tuesday 11 AM – 12 PM

About the project:
This cohort will train undergraduate students to conduct critical social science research on race and inequality with real-world policy implications. Each student accepted into the cohort will be assigned to one of seven IUPRA working groups, the principal research teams that conduct social science research at IUPRA: (1) Resilience and Adversity in Children’s Ecology; (2) Black Politics in the Diaspora; (3) Education Policy; (4) Entrepreneurship in the Black Diaspora; (5) Reproductive Justice; (6) Migration, Health, and Inequality, and (7) Numbers 4 Justice—quantitative antiracist research advancing social justice. Collectively, these groups will offer students a diverse perspective on the cohort’s theme of Race, Inequality, and Public Policy, while also giving them an opportunity to learn about various research traditions.

Students in the cohort will work as undergraduate research assistants in the specific working group to which they are assigned, performing various tasks, including conducting literature reviews, assisting with data collection and cleaning, contributing to presentations, and participating in working group meetings. Students will be required to attend weekly group meetings with the faculty leads. Meetings will be used to discuss the activities students have participated in and provide a forum for questions about conducting research. During select meetings, scholars and practitioners will be invited to give short presentations on topics including what it means to conduct critical social science research, the policy-making process in Texas, racial classification in the U.S. census, and policy brief writing. Additionally, URAP students and their graduate mentors will be invited to attend IUPRA events (e.g., policy workshops) and have opportunities to meet with invited speakers.

This cohort will provide students with skills and resources needed for them to thrive in their current majors while preparing them for successful careers as leaders, creators, and change makers. They will develop key research skills that will be immediately useful for writing research papers and theses. Moreover, because IUPRA’s working groups are led by scholars from various disciplines (e.g., Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology, and Economics), students will be exposed to multidisciplinary perspectives on research that will help them prepare for future endeavors, including graduate school. Students will also encounter real-world examples of how social science research can influence policy, drawing on the work of IUPRA scholars who have shaped educational policy, advocated for improved racial classification in the U.S. census, testified before the Texas Legislature, and served as experts in U.S. immigration courts.

All cohort members will complete a capstone project with two parts: (1) a short memo on how their experiences in the program enhanced their understanding of a specific issue associated with race, inequality, and public policy; and (2) a one-page policy brief using evidence from existing research to provide policy solutions to real-world problems. Topic selection for capstone projects will be based on students’ working group assignment.  

About the faculty leads:
The cohort will be co-led by Dr. Yasmiyn Irizarry, Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Associate Director of IUPRA, and Dr. Kevin Thomas, Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Director of IUPRA. Dr. Irizarry’s research focuses on race, education, and justice using critical quantitative methodologies, while Dr. Thomas’ research examines issues related to immigration, race, and health.

Unit: Linguistics Research Center

Faculty lead: Danny Law

Meeting time: Monday 10–11 AM

About the project:
Students will learn critical skills involved in research in the Digital Humanities by contributing to projects studying ancient and underrepresented languages from regions such as Mesoamerica, the Middle East, and parts of Europe and Asia, and putting those languages in their rich historical and social context. Participation will provide students with a grounding in software design issues in the context of providing specialist and non-specialist users with online access to scholarly databases. They will contribute to the construction of language databases and learn how database and interface design impacts the types of questions researchers and enthusiasts can ask and answer with the data available.

A mentor will lead weekly meetings that will focus on outlining and motivating successive steps in the process of creating and curating databases for online lexical resources in a number of languages, and tailoring those resources for a variety of public and academic audiences. This will include explanations of why the database architecture looks a certain way and the types of research its contents are intended to support. Introductory meetings and supporting readings will introduce students to relevant concepts from linguistics, including the production and textual representation of language sounds, as well as fundamental concepts in the study of language change and the development of historical writing systems. Subsequent meetings will transition to discussions of the computational tools used in creating such databases, moving from simple spreadsheet creation to data cleaning and uniformization with OpenRefine, and to more automated workflows with Python and GitHub. Students will put these tools to use in their own efforts to sort through language resources and extend current databases. Each week the mentor will review new contributions and provide feedback geared toward helping with error checking, simplifying workflows, and encouraging the exploration of novel ideas and contributions.

Students will be able to choose to participate in one of three projects, depending on their particular interests and background: IELEX, SemitiLEX, or MayaLEX. IELEX (currently online) supports the study of languages in the Indo-European family, the earliest language family to be studied via the perspective of historical linguistics and, consequently, the most thoroughly understood. The new SemitiLEX project remains under construction and, when released, will provide a similar but updated resource for studying languages in the Semitic family, such as Akkadian, Arabic, and Hebrew, among many others. Another new project, MayaLEX, will provide the first comparative online lexical database for the Mayan languages, starting with a focus on the languages Ch’olti’, Kaqchikel, K’iche’, and Yucatec as spoken in the Colonial period.

Each student will make a meaningful contribution to these cumulative projects. They will add lexical data to existing online resources for Indo-European languages (via the IELEX), Mayan languages (MayaLEX), or for the Semitic languages (SemitiLEX), depending on the project selected. Dedicated pages in each resource will list the names of contributors. Moreover, individual entries within the underlying data will have author and date stamps, so that individual students’ contributions can be clearly discerned in any research stemming from use of the resources.

Students in this cohort will build their research skills along a range of axes, including: (1) increased familiarity with a range of different scripts from world languages; (2) ability to consult print and online lexical resources to extract salient information; (3) honed ability to break large, nebulous problems into smaller, solvable problems; (4) familiarity with computational tools like OpenRefine, Python, and GitHub; (5) familiarity with incorporating User Experience considerations into online resources; (6) understanding of Model-View-Controller architecture of websites; (7) basics of sound structures of languages and their written representations; (8) familiarity with elements of historical linguistics; and (9) adapting materials to the needs and interests of varied non-specialist audiences.

About the faculty lead:
Dr. Danny Law is the director of the Linguistics Research Center and Associate Professor of Linguistics. His research focus is on Mayan languages, historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and writing systems. He has overseen several large-scale projects, including a National Science Foundation language documentation project for Ixil Mayan and a National Endowment for the Humanities project producing public-facing online resources on early Mayan languages.

Unit: Department of History

Faculty lead: Monica Muñoz Martinez

Meeting time: Wednesday 1:30–2:30 PM

About the project:
A 2021 national audit of monuments in the United States, conducted by the non-profit Monument Lab and funded by the Mellon Foundation, found that the monument landscape is overwhelmingly white and male, that the most common features of American monuments reflect war and conquest, and that the story of the United States as it is told by our current monuments misrepresents our history. The audit recorded 5,917 monuments in the U.S. that mention the Civil War with only nine recorded monuments that represent post-Civil War Reconstruction. Additionally, only 1% of recorded civil war monuments mention slavery. Regarding the 916 recorded monuments that mention “pioneer”, only 15% mention Native American, Indians, or Indigenous. Dr. Paul Farber, Director of Monument Lab, reflected on the role of monuments in obscuring the past: “Monuments are not mere facts on a pedestal—they can suppress far more than they summon us to remember.”

What is the landscape of public history in Texas? With the establishment of the Texas Historical Commission (THC) in 1953, the commission played a central role in selectively curating the historical events, people, or sites that deserved recognition. By installing historical markers across Texas, the THC ensured that Texans in every county had access to a controlled version of public Texas history. How have the historical markers installed in the 1950s and 1960s weathered the advances in historical knowledge over the past 50 years? What has been the impact of the THC’s Untold Marker Program, established in 2006 with the intention to “address historical gaps, promote topics, and proactively document significant underrepresented subjects or untold stories.”

The cohort will meet weekly. During the first weekly meetings, students will read and discuss key publications in public history and Texas history. In weeks that follow, the graduate mentor lead will provide trainings in analyzing primary sources and methods for digital and archival research. Collectively, the cohort will divide the state of Texas into regions. Each student will select 2–3 counties to review the historical markers, monuments, and museums that present histories to the public. The researchers will analyze the places, people, and topics commemorated and consider what histories are accessible and what histories are inaccessible in different regions of the state. The cohort will develop a tagging system to categorize markers and monuments and learn mapping skills to create visualizations. Students will also contribute to a report on the team’s findings and make recommendations on opportunities that remain to commemorate Texas history and to inspire Texas residents’ interest in local histories. Additionally, the cohort will take trips with the faculty lead and the graduate mentor to archives at UT libraries, the Texas state archives, and the Texas Historical Commission.

About the faculty lead:
Monica Muñoz Martinez, PhD, is an Associate Professor of History and the Clyde Rabb Littlefield Chair in Texas History Fellow. Martinez is an award-winning author, teacher, and public historian. She co-founded the award-winning public history project Refusing to Forget. She has collaborated with the Texas Historical Commission and the Bullock Texas State History Museum. She’s also an expert consultant for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. She currently leads the Mapping Violence research lab which includes graduate and undergraduate researchers. As PI for the research lab, Martinez leads weekly research team meetings, facilitating skills workshops in historical digital research methods, archival research methods, and data management.

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Unit: Department of Spanish & Portuguese and the Speech Learning Lab

Faculty lead: Charlie Nagle

Meeting time: Tuesday 11 AM – 12 PM

About the project:
Learning another language is challenging, and learning to comprehend and speak the language are especially difficult. One reason for this difficulty is the fact that the sounds of the new language are usually different from the sounds of the languages we already know. This means that we may struggle to hear differences between sounds, which can make it hard to tell similar sounding words apart and recognize words in running speech. Language learning researchers study how to make language training and instruction, including speech instruction, as effective as possible.

In this URAP, we will study what we know about speech learning, discussing different types of training activities known to help learners improve their listening and speaking skills. We will discuss speech perception experiments, which provide information on how well people recognize and process similar sounding words. We will also discuss speech production experiments, which provide information on how people pronounce the sounds and produce the rhythm of the new language. Participants will work to prepare and analyze audio files in a variety of languages, including Spanish, Thai, and Korean.

This URAP involves weekly student-centered meetings, at which we will discuss relevant readings and complete hands-on research training activities designed to give participants the knowledge and skills they need to engage in the research project. Students should expect to spend up to nine hours per week on this URAP and to complete reading and homework assignments for each meeting. Participants will gain experience with the following research skills: (1) critical reading and synthesis of academic sources, (2) experimental design and planning, (3) data collection and data processing, and (4) acoustic analysis of speech.

This URAP cohort brings a critical, empirical approach to the study of language learning. One of our key strengths is the fact that we have run two previous URAP cohorts and have learned and updated our approach based on student feedback. Our URAP features a wide range of research activities that are likely to appeal to students interested in diverse aspects of the research process. Our research is also highly applied, with direct applications to language learning and teaching techniques, which increases the relevance of the work. By working with us, students can expect to cultivate an understanding of the research process, including why research is valuable in the first place. They can also expect to continue to develop soft skills related to collaboration, communication, and problem-solving.

By the end of the semester, we plan to deliver a research talk to a relevant unit on campus, such as the Second Language Studies group or the Texas Language Center. We will also begin developing a presentation to be delivered at a national conference such as the Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching conference or the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference. Participants may have the opportunity to participate in a workshop for language teachers, which Dr. Nagle will offer in AY25-26 with funding from his current NSF award.

About the faculty lead:
Dr. Charlie Nagle is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Applied Linguistics. Dr. Nagle’s research focuses on how individuals learn additional languages as adults (for instance, Spanish). He is especially interested in how adults learn the sound system of their additional language(s) and the training techniques that can be used to help learners improve their perception and production of those languages. Dr. Nagle has worked with over a dozen undergraduate research assistants. At UT Austin, he directs the Speech Learning Lab, which is funded by a research grant from the National Science Foundation’s Program in Perception, Action, and Cognition.

Units: Department of Psychology and Department of Linguistics

Faculty leads: Desmond Ong & Jessy Li

Meeting time: Tuesday 11 AM – 12 PM

About the project:
Do you know people who ask chatGPT for emotional support, or even to be their therapist? More and more people are turning to AI like chatGPT for empathy—such topics are trending on social media—and the few scientific studies so far have shown that people rate AI-generated text as more empathic than human-written text. In this research project, we will study this in more detail, especially by examining the specific ways in which people and chatGPT express empathy, and which of these behaviors are most valued and effective.

Students in this URAP will work closely with a graduate student mentor and will engage in weekly cohort-centered meetings. During these cohort meetings, students will take turns presenting relevant scientific findings; learn professional development skills (e.g., how to form a research question, how to manage projects in GitHub, how to design a research study, etc.); and receive training and support for creating experimental stimuli, performing qualitative coding tasks, and conducting a cross-disciplinary literature review. Several times during the semester, students will also participate in meetings with the entire interdisciplinary project team (including members across Psych, Linguistics, I-school, etc.), where they will provide status updates on their work.

Across the span of the semester, students will learn about and engage in a range of research experiences, including: (1) creating experimental stimuli; (2) performing qualitative coding tasks; (3) conducting a cross-disciplinary literature review by critically reading and synthesizing research across specialties including psychology, linguistics, communication, and natural language processing; (4) designing an experiment; (5) developing computational skills in R and GitHub, such as data management, analysis, and visualization; (6) presenting key scientific findings; and (7) engaging in research discussions with scientists across multiple disciplines.

Students will come away from this URAP with a comprehensive understanding of the research process, from conceptualization to execution. By working collaboratively on this interdisciplinary work, students will gain hands-on experience working with data, reading empirical papers, and communicating scientific findings. The skills learned in this cohort will be a strong foundational support for research across a broad range of domains including psychology, linguistics, computational social science, and related fields.

At the end of the semester, students will present a research talk, with prepared slides, to our interdisciplinary research group. Additionally, they will have completed a full-length literature review on supportive language and empathy spanning across psychology, linguistics, and supportive communication.

About the faculty leads:
Dr. Desmond Ong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, where he directs the Computational Affective and Social Cognition Lab. As a computational cognitive scientist, he is interested in how people (and machines) reason about other people’s emotions and mental states. He is affiliated with the UT NLP Group.

Dr. Jessy Li is an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department. Her research interests are in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP), specifically discourse and pragmatics, natural language generation, and computational social science. She is associated with the Computational Linguistics Group at UT Linguistics and the UT NLP Group.

Unit: Humanities Institute

Faculty lead: Samantha Pinto

Meeting time: Wednesday 10:30–11:30 AM

About the project:
This cohort will kick off the UT Mobile Reproductive Health Lab, a project meant to engage researchers from across the University from all levels, as well as Texas communities and beyond to study the nexus of law, access, and resources in analyzing reproductive health. Socio-medical studies of health outcomes have outlined the crisis in underserved and rural health areas, and outlined the possibilities and limits of medical technology and virtual medical care to bridge geographic and economic gaps. This nascent lab seeks to overlay these two areas of health research through the study of mobile reproductive health. From long-standing South African mobile apps for maternal health to the closure of critical clinics for gender, sexual, and reproductive health across rural Texas to the global availability of by-mail pharmaceuticals for reproductive health to community mobilizations for more access to reproductive care, the lab will document resources and analyze their representation and functionality across geographies, cultural norms, and legal landscapes.  

For this pilot semester, we will focus on two projects. One project—stemming from potential Summer research on healthcare access and legal ambiguity over reproductive care—will code qualitative interviews with healthcare providers across Texas to look for patterns of thought and representation of reproductive health in the wake of changing laws in the state, especially how/where/from whom folks access reproductive health info across the state. The second inter-related project will focus on analyzing mobile reproductive health apps and services across the globe to identify normative and best practices for accessing safe and accurate care and information about health and resources. Students will be able to be involved with both projects and will be trained in research skills, including (1) interview coding; (2) legal research on ongoing court cases; (3) transnational and comparative health research, including medical journals and clinical studies; and (4) critical cultural analysis methods for technology and media. We also hope to build in some introductory GIS training for future applications of this research.

This project will offer experience in research across multiple disciplines and fields, including legal, medical, policy, health communications, technological research, and cultural studies. Working as a team, students will be able to see the research experience come to life, through both traditional outcomes (two research papers/reports for a conference that will begin to draft over the semester with student researchers listed as co-authors) and more public facing work (infographics that can provide resources to healthcare and legal professionals seeking more accurate information about policy and law in the state as well as resources for mobile reproductive access for community members).

About the faculty lead:
Dr. Samantha Pinto is a Professor of English and affiliated faculty of African & African Diaspora Studies and Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. From 2022–2025, she has served as Director of the UT Humanities Institute, transforming it into a research institute for humanities and arts scholars across the university. 

Unit: Department of Government

Faculty lead: Sean Theriault

Meeting time: Tuesday 2:30–3:30 PM

About the project:
The Policy Agendas Project (PAP) is seeking undergraduate research assistants (URAs) to help complete a data base that measures the legislative agenda of Congress over time. They will be directly involved in the coding of data by policy topics. PAP collects and organizes data from various archived sources to trace changes in the national policy agenda and public policy outcomes since the Second World War. The database allows journalists, scholars, and interest groups to easily track and compare the agendas of presidents and members of Congress to assess how those actions reflected the mood of the country.

As URAs, the students will be involved in coding congressional bills by policy topic using the PAP codebook thereby becoming experts in public policy topics. The first four weeks of the semester will have a one-hour training session in which URAs learn about the complexities of public policy coding and how to handle difficult bills. During this time, students will have a sample of bills to code each week on which they will receive feedback indicating whether the bill was coded correctly. Once the training period is over, sets of two URAs will receive a real set of bills to code by policy topic that they will code independently over the course of a week. They will then meet with one of two graduate student mentors to ask questions and reconcile differences between the codes of each URA. During this meeting, they will have the opportunity to either advocate for why their code makes the most sense or learn why another code fits better—we call this the reconciliation process.

By the end of the semester, the URAs will have coded over 4,000 bills. At the end of the semester, they will create a research presentation about a part of PAP or on a policy area of your interest. Graduate student mentors and Professor Theriault will support students on these presentations.

Working with PAP will provide students with the opportunity to develop an intimate understanding of the issues that capture the interests of members of Congress. PAP datasets are used widely in the political science and public policy fields, and a deep understanding of them is valued widely in graduate schools and across academia. The purpose of this program is also to introduce topics in public policy and provide students with the tools to seek out details, issues, and gaps in understanding in the various fields.

About the faculty lead:
The project will be led by Professor Sean Theriault, who has published six books and dozens of articles on congressional decision-making and party polarization. Over his 25-year career at the University of Texas, Professor Theriault has been named the “Professor of the Year” by the Senate of College Councils, the Friar Centennial Teaching Fellow by the Friar Society, and been inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He has taken more than 350 students to Washington, D.C., as part of the Pickle Undergraduate Research Program and more than 100 students to Rome as part of his Maymester on the politics of the Catholic Church.

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