History majors and history and geography minors are leading participants in all of Elon’s signature undergraduate research experiences. Our faculty members take great joy in sharing their research interests with students and in collaborating in the creation of new knowledge.

  • Lumen Scholars – Since the inception of the Lumen Scholars Program in 2007, departmental faculty have supervised 10 Lumens. These scholars have worked on an impressive array of projects.
  • Honors and Elon College Fellows  – History majors may count the honors thesis as their senior seminar and comprehensive evaluation for the major, and Elon College Fellows may do the same, provided certain conditions are met. History majors have excelled in these programs and written on topics as diverse as the evolution of Charles de Gaulle as France’s wartime leader, to the development of legal education in the US, to strategies of resistance under various Latin American dictatorships, etc.
  • Historians and Geographers are always well represented at the annual Student Undergraduate Research Forum. Abstracts for presentations our students have given over the last two years ave available here.
  • Independent Study – Students in 2014-15 worked one-on-one with department faculty through HST or GEO 499s to address a wide range of research questions.  Topics included the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia, rural postal service in the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century US, food deserts in Alamance County, urban agriculture, the trials of Japanese war criminals after WW II, and changing nonprofit responses to the high incarceration rates for black men in the US.

Our students also present their research at a variety of conferences around the country, including both NCUR (National Conferences on Undergraduate Research) as well as appropriate discipline-specific venues. Conference dates, locations and submission information can be found on the student Moodle site.

For more on our students’ outstanding accomplishments, see our Facebook page.