Inaugural Undergraduate Archival Research Project Prizes awarded to two students

The Undergraduate Archival Research Project Prize began in Spring Quarter of 2025 with the aim of encouraging and engaging with undergraduate primary source research.

The Undergraduate Archival Research Project Prize comes with a $1,500 award for a paper written using primary source materials. It is the first of a series of similar prizes that will reward students for using the holdings of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, said librarian Dana Lamparello, who chairs the prize committee. 

The inaugural prize was limited to a shorter-than-usual submission season because it was greenlit later in the academic year, Lamparello said. To compensate, entrants did not need to use McCormick Library holdings this time around, but they still needed to use primary sources.

The winning submission was submitted by Shinyi Ding ’26. Her paper “Reading the ‘TBA’ in Central America during the ICM/USAID Grant to Expand the Role of the Midwife: 1970-1979” was written for Global Health Studies 310, Maternal Health in the 20th Century, taught by Sarah Rodriguez. It explores the ways midwives in Central America were once trained by medical professionals without deep regard for local traditions and beliefs. 

A runner-up prize was awarded to Faith Magiera ’27 for “Nero’s Mother and Intertextual ‘Wombs’: Reading Hamlet’s Classical Archive”. Written originally for Jeffrey Masten's course English 339: Studies in Shakespeare—Hamlet: That is the Question, the paper drew in part upon the McCormick’s copy of a book of plays by the Roman playwright Seneca. 

Because improving access to resources remains one of Dean Xuemao Wang’s priorities, the committee plans to expand prize categories to engage more undergraduates from different disciplines, to reward long-form papers, and even to support creative efforts drawn from archival collections.

The next call for project submissions will be posted in November.