Oberlin’s History Design Lab: Creating a Space for Undergraduate-Led Research

This talk explores the unique features, exciting possibilities, and real challenges of the model of the history lab that was recently launched at Oberlin College. Oberlin’s History Design Lab supports student-led, faculty and staff-mentored outward-facing history research projects. History Design Lab projects focus on innovative ways to answer questions about history, especially histories of people, events, and phenomena that may have been missed in popular recounting of the past. HDL is also a space where students learn about digital tools and different ways of communicating historical research to the public. The lab is open to students of any year and major. A student leadership team supervises four ongoing projects: the student historical blog and journal, On Second Thought; the African American Women’s Intellectual History Project, where students create a public archive about the intellectual work of African American women who either attended or are closely affiliated with Oberlin College and Conservatory; the Oberlin History as American History research project, where students do research that uses Oberlin’s story to help us better understand the history of the United States; and an oral history project about the impact of COVID on residents of a local retirement community. HDL seeks to give undergraduates a space to learn how to do historical research, to work in teams, and to develop their own leadership capacity. Our student leadership team ranges from first-years to seniors from a variety of different majors. HDL is set up as an extracurricular activity; neither the students nor the faculty leader currently receive academic or teaching credit for their participation, a model which has both costs and benefits. In my talk, I will consider some of the challenges of our model—including issues of funding and sustainability—while also emphasizing the very real rewards of working with HDL for both students and faculty.