Arts RA positions for President's Award recipients

Classical Studies

Professor / contact	Altay Coskun
Position available	ongoing
Project	Database project Amici Populi Romani: collection of biographical data of kings and dynasts of the Mediterranean world who were friends of the Romans.
RA tasks	Depending on the skills and experience of the student, s/he could help me with the design and development of the website, with the production of digital genealogical tables, and/or with the editing of articles, many of which are written by non-native speakers.

Professor / contact	Altay Coskun
Position available	ongoing
Project	Ancient Black Sea Studies
RA tasks	The student would first be introduced into Ancient Black Sea Studies, with a particular focus on the Bosporan Kingdom on the North Coast of the Black Sea. Depending on the skills and languages the student commands, s/he could be involved in editing conference papers, website design, production of small texts (blurbs, summaries), digitizing texts, and the organization of the team meetings.

Professor / contact	Altay Coskun
Position available	ongoing
Project	Biblical Texts as Historical Sources for Hellenistic Judaea I have recently moved my research interest to Hellenistic and Roman Judaea. In particular, I have found new clues to understand the process how the prophetic Book of Daniel or the dynastic history of 1 Maccabees have been composed or revised and reedited. This opens many new perspectives on how to use these Biblical texts as historical sources. I am currently writing a series of journal articles and book chapters on these topics.
RA tasks	The student would help edit my texts, discuss related questions with me and potentially also develop a research agenda of their own in the field, if the cooperation is for a longer period. I typically organize one international workshop per year at UW and would like to include the student in its preparation.

Professor / contact	Altay Coskun
Position available	ongoing
Project	Kolchian Studies My research on the ancient Black Sea region includes the legendary kingdom of Kolchis (Colchis), also called the land of the Argonauts and believed to have been the home of the sorceress Medeia. I have recently produced a series of articles on the historical geography: based on intensive literary studies (geographic literature, tragedy and epic poetry) as well as surveying recent scholarship on archaeology and using Google Earth, I have suggested new locations among others for Dioskurias, the largest Greek city on the eastern Black Sea coast. My ongoing work traces the various cities that were identified as Aia, the home city of Medeia, in the early period of Greek colonialism. I further study how the myth of Athamas, Ino, Phrixos, and Helle developed over time.
RA tasks	The student would help edit these and other papers on the ancient Black Sea for publishing, assist my research with literary surveys, and potentially also develop a research agenda of their own in the field, if the cooperation is for a longer period.

Communication Arts

Professor / contact	Shana MacDonald
Position available	ongoing fall 2021 - spring 2024
Project	Dr. MacDonald’s project Feminist Digital Media (2016-2020): Building Affective and Activist Worlds examines digital media practices including memes, hashtags, and TikTok videos since 2016 which have contributed to a range of feminist activist movements from intersectional, Indigenous, trans, and queer feminist perspectives. The project both documents and archives these practices and shares them with public audiences through the Instagram account @aesthetic.resistance .
RA tasks	Collecting, organizing, managing digital materials including memes, hashtags, TikTok videos. Creating summaries of media events, literature review of digital media articles, creating and managing content for our Instagram account.

English Language & Literature

Professor / contact	Marcel O'Gorman
Position available	fall 2018 (preferred), ongoing
Project	Digital Abstinence? Yes, the title of my SSHRC-funded research project is "Digital Abstinence: The Art, Philosophy, and Politics of Unplugging." The project runs out of the Critical Media Lab at the Creative Hub in Downtown Kitchener. There are many components to the project, from a psychology study of phone bans in high school, to interviewing Old Order Mennonites, to various digital art projects created in the Critical Media Lab.
RA tasks	The RA would help teach workshops in the Critical Media Lab and other locations, prepare materials for the workshops, and possibly contribute to data collection. The candidate will have access to a maker space and would be part of a lively research creation community.

Professor / contact	Randy Allen Harris
Position available	ongoing
Project	This is an international, interdisciplinary project that combines rhetoric, style, cognition, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. It is based on a large database of rhetorical figures that models human knowledge. We are growing the database with a citizen-science game. The end goal is to support Machine Learning corpus work for such purposes as argument mining, text summarization, and authorship attribution).
RA tasks	The RA will work both independently and in collaboration with other researchers. Research activities will include some combination of data analysis, data collection, database management, game design, literature search, wiki-entry and reference-guide content provision, and bibliographical research, depending on the talents and interests of the RA.

Professor / contact	Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher Personal website
Position available	ongoing
Project	The Demos Lab (Democratization through Education in Medicine, technolOgy and Science Lab), examines communication in STEM subjects. The project for this position is focused on examining how climate change is discussed and debated among Millennial and Gen Z adults and other generational cohorts in Canada.
RA tasks	The RA will work with my existing research team to conduct bibliographic research, code data, and other tasks as appropriate to the RA and current research program of the team. The RA will be provided with training in research methods for interpretive and qualitative research as well as training for any tools we're using in the project.

History

Professor / contact	Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, History/Balsillie School of International Affairs kbrucelo@uwaterloo.ca
Position available	Fall 2024, Winter 2025, Spring 2025, with possible extensions
Project	This project examines the history of the Nelson Mandela Rules, the UN's guidelines for prison conditions and prisoners’ rights around the globe. It will examine why and how the Rules first emerged in the 1920s, how they have changed over time, and the power dynamics behind their development and dissemination. Examining the history of the Mandela Rules will offer crucial insights into past and present understandings of human rights, incarceration, and global governance.
RA tasks	The training and work for RAs will focus on primary data collection and analysis, secondary data collection and analysis, as well as knowledge mobilization.

Psychology

Professor / contact	Hilary Bergsieker digrlab@uwaterloo.ca
Position available	ongoing; typically two-term commitment for new lab members
Project	The Diversity and Intergroup Relations Lab uses experimental social psychology research methods to investigate interactions between diverse groups of people, studying factors that make them fail or flourish. We use lab-based experiments and field studies to test how, when, and why people establish, maintain, and repair trust in others from different backgrounds. Within the Engendering Success in STEM research consortium, our work advances gender equity in STEM fields by promoting adolescent girls’ identity fit in STEM and full-time professionals’ allyship to women in STEM.
RA tasks	Students working in my lab gain broad exposure to social-psychological theory and research methodology, with advanced students engaging in data analysis as well. I personally train lab members in literature review, experimental procedure, survey design, stimuli development, participant management, data preparation, and data analysis, as well as developing their skill in using programs and platforms such as Qualtrics, Zotero, ChatPlat, Prolific, Office/Excel, and SPSS or R.

Professor / contact	Clara Colombatto clara.colombatto@uwaterloo.ca
Position available	ongoing; for present or future terms; minimum 2-term commitment
Project	Our lab investigates various aspects of human perception and cognition at the intersection of vision science, cognitive psychology, and social cognition — with a special focus on how we perceive other agents and their mental states. Topics include unconscious processing of social cues, perception of non-biological agents (e.g., robots and AI), perception of others' cognitive states (e.g., attention and intentions), and how these percepts influence our own mental states (e.g., our own attention and intentions) as well as on other aspects of cognition (e.g., metacognition, interpersonal trust, decision-making, moral judgments, and even aesthetic preferences).
RA tasks	Undergraduate students in our lab will gain experience with all aspects of the research projects — from literature review and experimental design to data collection, analysis, writing, and presentation. In addition to participating in ongoing projects, students are encouraged to develop their own projects in close collaboration with the PI and graduate students.

Professor / contact	Igor Grossmann igrossma@uwaterloo.ca
Position available	ongoing; typically requires two-term commitment for new lab members
Project	The Wisdom and Culture Lab investigates the interplay between human cognition, wisdom, and AI interactions, focusing on how these elements shape and are shaped by cultural and social processes. Our research aims to demystify wisdom—exploring whether sound judgment represents distinct qualities beyond abstract intelligence and personality—or if it's an idealized construct. We delve into augmented cognition and cultural modelling, seeking to redefine how cultural changes and psychological processes are understood through cutting-edge methodologies, including natural language processing, forecasting, and computational modelling.
RA tasks	Research Assistants in the Wisdom and Culture Lab will gain broad exposure to computational social science, cognitive science, and cultural psychology, engaging with both theoretical and applied research methodologies. Tasks include literature review, experimental design, survey development, participant management, data preparation, and data analysis. Advanced RAs will have opportunities to work with tools such as Python, R, Qualtrics, and other data analysis platforms. Training includes developing skills in project-specific software, managing experimental procedures, and contributing to the lab’s broader research goals on human-AI interactions, augmented cognition, and the dynamics of wisdom and judgment across cultures.

Professor / contact	Ori Friedman friedman@uwaterloo.ca
Position available	ongoing; currently open to new opportunities, whether for immediate, upcoming, or future terms
Project	My lab investigates social-cognitive understanding in both children and adults. Topics include how children and adults understand thoughts, emotions, and actions; how they understand ownership, rights, and responsibilities; how they understand the distinction between fantasy and reality, and between what is possible and impossible.
RA tasks	Research assistants in the lab are normally paid and have the opportunity to be involved in all aspects of the research process. Our publications have often included undergraduates as authors, sometimes as first author. Regular research assistant duties include: communicating with childcare centers as potential locations for our studies; visiting childcare centers to test children and help with testing them; running online studies on adult participants; conducting literature reviews; and generating ideas for new studies.

Sociology and Legal Studies

Professor / contact	Sarah Turnbull s3turnbull@uwaterloo.ca
Position available	ongoing
Project	The Prison Transparency Project is a seven-year, collaborative, comparative study of prison transparency in seven research sites across Canada, Argentina, and Spain. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, this project researches both formal mechanisms and informal practices that promote the movement of information in and out of carceral sites, both for accountability purposes, and also to defend the rights and freedoms of incarcerated persons.
RA tasks	Research activities include data collection and organization, literature searches, filing and managing access to information requests, coordination of research activities, and creating content for the project website and social media.