Undergraduate Research

The Department of History is committed to providing undergraduate students with the opportunity to engage in the process of historical discovery and analysis through meaningful original research. We regularly participate in the Support for Undergraduate Research Fellows (SURF) program, which provides monetary awards to undergraduate students working as research assistants directly with faculty. The opportunity to engage in thoughtful and progressively sophisticated research provides multiple benefits to students that can strengthen a graduate school application or enhance a resume in preparation for that first professional job after college:

  • Hands-on experience in information gathering, synthesis, and analysis
  • Networking
  • Presentation or publication experience

Students with particular in-depth research interests may elect to take a two-semester senior thesis sequence, History 681-682, in which they write a substantial research paper on a topic of their choice in consultation with a faculty thesis advisor. Our students also have opportunities to present their research at campus and statewide conferences highlighting undergraduate research, and at regional conferences of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honorary society.

For more on undergraduate research at UWM, see:

UWM Land Acknowledgement: We acknowledge in Milwaukee that we are on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Menominee homeland along the southwest shores of Michigami, North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida and Mohican nations remain present.   |   To learn more, visit the Electa Quinney Institute website.