Past Fondren Fellows Projects

2026 Summer Fondren Fellows Projects

Paper Trails: Evaluating a Collection of Museum Exhibition Publications
The Brown Fine Arts Library (BFAL) is home to a sizable collection of uncataloged museum publications that were produced to accompany exhibitions. These items include pamphlets, announcements, booklets, and other short-form documents from the 1960s onward, organized geographically. The collection is no longer being actively developed, and none of the items are discoverable in the library’s online catalog. As it currently exists, this collection is essentially invisible to users and potential researchers. Nevertheless, these materials occupy a significant portion of the limited physical space in the BFAL footprint of Fondren Library, and assistance is needed in evaluating and relocating the collection. An initial assessment has shown that the collection includes gems of design inspiration or documentation of artists or movements that are greatly underrepresented in the larger literature. This project is an opportunity for the fellow(s) to evaluate these materials and assist in creating three ‘paper trails’ to organize the collection by:
1. Identifying materials to be considered for cataloging that could contribute to the research priorities of Rice students and faculty, and that may be rare or not widely available at other institutions;
2. Creating a teaching/exemplar collection of items with interesting design elements that could coordinate with the Athena Press and book arts/printing design instruction and outreach;
3. Assessing material to be withdrawn and removed from the BFAL.
The overarching goal of this project is to transform a literal wall of paper into a tailored and discoverable collection of resources that will better serve the Rice community. It is an opportunity for truly hands-on (with gloves, if you like!) collection management and interaction with printed materials.
Mentors: K.Sarah Ostrach and Jeanette Sewell
roadsTaken: Part II
During the academic year 2022-23, three Fondren Fellows–Josué Alvarenga, Samuel Lee, and Indrani Maitra–helped our team at the Baker Institute Center for Energy Studies and Spatial Studies Lab map the more than 11,000 structures destroyed by highway construction in Houston from 1946-1974. These students then presented their findings at the Black Houston(s) Symposium. Their labor and scholarship helped create the interactive website roadsTaken, which chronicles the first three decades of highway construction and displacement in Houston.
Today, Houston is at a turning point, planners are in the process of building over $10 billion in highway expansions in the urban core of the region. Initial estimates place ongoing displacement at over 600 structures and over 1,000 residents. roadsTaken, as the most comprehensive catalog of historical highway displacements in Houston, with the help of potential summer 2026 Fondren Fellows, will expand its spatial database, which currently ends in 1974, to the present and to near future. Fellows will be invited to become spatial historians for the summer, working to develop the project’s research strategy, their own historical and GIS skills, before mapping and cataloging the people and buildings displaced over the last five decades and in the coming five years. By the end of the second stage of this project roadsTaken will be a complete temporal cartography of the past, present, and near future of transit infrastructure building and displacement in Houston, and the essential resource for scholars and policy-makers interested in the impacts of these displacements on the poor and Houstonians of color.
Since roadsTaken’s publication in the winter of 2024, the roadsTaken team has gathered the materials, both archival and technical, to complete the last 50 years of highway spatial history in Houston. Students will begin work by engaging with current scholarship in this subject from the field of urban and planning history. Students will plan their work with close supervisor guidance, georeference and enrich historical maps and other archival sources, and then extract, classify, and create spatial historical data (using GeoAI and by hand) from these sources. Students will also select a key region or neighborhood of a city and use historical maps, aerials, and newspapers to track its evolution before, during, and after highway construction. Finally, students will create a historical narrative around the spatial data and historical sources they have worked with. At the close of the project, the supervisor will update the interactive map with the fellows’ work and publish their narratives on roadstaken.org.
Mentor: Matt Drwenski
Reimagining Fondren: A Charrette Study to Redesign Fondren’s North Reading Room to Align with Student Needs
Imagine redesigning one of Rice’s most iconic spaces! Join a hands-on charrette to help reimagine Fondren Library’s North Reading Room as a vibrant hub for learning, collaboration, and connection. Blend creativity, research, and design thinking to shape how the next generation of Owls will study, share ideas, and build campus community.
This project invites a Fondren Fellow to collaborate on a charrette study to reimagine a portion of Fondren Library’s first floor—one of the library’s busiest and most visible spaces. As academic and social needs evolve, this study will investigate how space can be better designed to foster inclusivity, collaboration, and scholarly engagement through the input of students. A charrette is an intensive, collaborative design workshop that brings together stakeholders to generate creative, research-based solutions to spatial challenges. Partnering with the Director of Access Services, the Fellow will employ participatory design methods, space-use analysis, and benchmarking of peer institutions to develop conceptual redesigns and actionable recommendations.
Mentor: Susan Garrison
Directories to Data: Automated Extraction of Houston City Directory Records
This project seeks to address a critical challenge in historical preservation and digital humanities (DH): the underutilization of vast numbers of historical directories due to the inherent difficulties in extracting large quantities of data from these archival print sources. Historical directories, such as city and professional directories, are rich sources of individual-level information regarding historical residences, businesses, professions, and even racial demographics. Their availability only in printed form has traditionally limited research to small sample sets in major urban areas.
We propose to develop an end-to-end, reproducible pipeline for digitizing historical directories into a structured database format, leveraging cutting-edge AI enterprise tools, specifically Microsoft Azure Document Intelligence in Foundry Tools. While conventional optical character recognition (OCR) and prebuilt models in AI excel at handling standard forms, receipts, or invoices, historical directories present unique methodological challenges related to their semi-consistent structure, dense shorthand, and the necessity of distinguishing directory entries from peripheral content (e.g., advertisements or headers).
The core of the project involves three phases of AI model application and refinement: first, extracting raw text and layout information using high-definition OCR tailored for documents; second, training and refining custom extraction and classification models to automatically isolate individual physician or resident entries; and third, segmenting entries and parsing the data into distinct fields (e.g., name, address, business, profession). The final pipeline will be documented and designed to be generalizable, to create a scalable method of extracting data from a variety of directories for historical research. This effort moves historical data from inaccessible print to a database format, which is essential for comprehensive analysis.
Mentors: Sean Smith and Norie Guthrie
Fondren on Demand: Creating Instructional Video Tutorials
This project addresses a need among Rice students for short-form, asynchronous instructional materials from Fondren Library. Over the duration of their fellowship, students will spearhead the creation of peer-to-peer multimedia learning content for the library, particularly video tutorials. Fellows will investigate how other academic institutions have developed instructional content, and will evaluate how Fondren may expand its current learning opportunities for students. In addition, they will be responsible for establishing procedures and norms while creating content through those proposed avenues. The project focuses on short-form video content, but fellows are encouraged to explore other innovative forms of media. Abby and Sireice will guide the fellows in developing strong and lasting instruction and outreach strategies to ensure users are at the center of the plan, and that there is an opportunity for continuity of this project.
The project will consist of four main overlapping phases:
1. Research: Investigating academic literature and similar projects from other universities.
2. Planning: Developing a production schedule, video topics, and scripts.
3. Production: Filming and editing videos.
4. Marketing: Publishing content and developing a marketing strategy.
Mentors: Sireice Edwards and Abby Stovall
Teaching Critical Generative AI Evaluation: Developing and Testing an Innovative Framework

2025-2026 Fondren Fellows Projects

Building a History of Industrial Accidents and Disasters in Houston
Who Owned Freedmen’s Town?: Tracking Deeds from 1867 to 1936
Teaching Qualitative Data Analysis Research Tools
Computing Cultural Heritage: Processing Physical and Born-digital Data in the White House Scientists' Archive
The Red Book of Houston
Readers’ Marks: tracing the past in Fondren’s rare book collections
Developing a Framework for Enhancing Teaching with AI
65 Years of SEL: A Research Archive Project
Open Data, Open Knowledge: Rice University Python-Based Solutions for Enhancing Access and Literacy in AI Era
Analysis of Medical Humanities Research Resources, Strategies, and Tools at Fondren Library
Expanding Access to Images in the Archives of the Impossible Letters
Continuing the Development of the Creosote Contamination Archive
Investigating Chinese American Aging Through the Decades
Comic Art Teaching and Study

2024-2025 Fondren Fellows Projects

Building and Employing New Tools for the Study of US Science Policy - Mentors: Kenneth Matthew and Kirstin Matthews
Building the "Creosote Contamination in Houston's Fifth Ward" Collection - Mentors: Carrie Masiello and Lisa Spiro
Campus Comics: Continuing the Rice Comics Anthology - Mentor: David Messmer
Comics without Borders - Mentor: Christopher Sperandio
Curating Rice's Environmental Research - Mentor: Shannon Kipphut-Smith
Enhancing Graduate Student Support for Digital Humanities - Mentor: Lisa Spiro, Sean Smith
Exploring Pedagogical Research at Rice and Beyond - Mentor: Catherine Barber
History Project for Rice University’s School of Engineering 50th Anniversary - Mentor: Jada Crawford
Maintain and Analyze Rice University Research Repository - Mentor: Arko Barman
Mapping Olivewood Cemetery - Mentors: Norie Guthrie and Fay Yarbrough
Milestones in Science: 50 years of Natural Sciences at Rice - Mentor: Lauren Kapcha
Open Access Publishing at Rice: Factors that Influence Researcher Choices and Sustainable Funding Models - Mentors: Cindy Pierard, Lisa Spiro, Shannon Kipphut-Smith, Scott Vieira
SlaveVoyages.org - Mentor: Daniel Domingues
Teaching Text Analysis - Mentor: Sean Smith
The Red Book of Houston - Mentors: Norie Guthrie and Fay Yarbrough
The Rice University CatOWLog: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Rice Creators - Mentor: Thumy Webb
Understanding Rice's Historic Energy Use to Inform the University's Climate Policy - Mentor: Richard Johnson

Summer 2024 Projects

Fall 2023-Spring 2024 Projects

Fall 2022-Spring 2023 Projects

Fall 2021-Spring 2022 Fondren Fellows Projects

Oral History Interviews and Archival Processing for the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice
This project will employ two students to conduct interviews for the Task Force, under the guidance of Dr. Alex Byrd and Dr. Caleb McDaniel. The students will also work with WRC staff to finalize consent forms, gather interview elements, create accessible PDFs of polished transcripts, and index interviews for online access.

Fellows: Calista I. Ukeh and Katie Nguyen
Mentors: Alex Byrd and Caleb McDaniel
The Sugar Land 95: Mapping Convict Leasing in Fort Bend County, 1865- 2018: A Continuation of the 2020-2021 Project
This project will employ a student to continue in the development of a story map on the Sugar Land 95 (95 African American people whose bodies were discovered at the site of a former prison farm) and the Imperial Prison Farm. The fellow will evaluate archival materials across various archives, and use ArcGIS to visualize the social, economic and cultural landscapes of Fort Bend County and the Imperial Prison Farm during the late 19th to mid-twentieth century.

Fellow: Juliana Phan
Mentor: Portia Hopkins
“Mapping the Reservation: Houston’s Red-Light District, 1908-1917”
This proposal builds on a successful prior Fondren Fellow’s ARCGIS work in 2019-2020. The new scope of work will build the basic interface to visualize real estate data in the Reservation by race over time.

Fellow: Grace Kneidel
Mentor: Brian Riedel
Changing the Subject at Fondren Library
Changing the Subject at Fondren Library is a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) project to investigate updating the Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) “Illegal aliens” in the Fondren Library catalog.

Fellow: Maria Alejandra Mora
Mentor: Jeanette Sewall
Enhancing the Fondren Fellows Program
In this meta-project, the Fellow will focus on the Fondren Fellows program itself, examining how to enhance its communications, assessment methods, and support for fellows and mentors. Based on that analysis, the Fellow will develop events, communication templates, guides, and other resources. The Fellow will also write a report synthesizing recommendations.

Fellow: Sydney Hicks
Mentor: Lisa Spiro
Making Sense of Government Education Resources
This project demonstrates how to utilize education statistics, reports, regulations, and other legislative materials and policies from free official U.S. federal and state government and international databases, and related Fondren Library subscribed commercial databases for searching government documents. Education professionals and the scholarly community will be able to efficiently obtain the necessary data for their research, program management, teaching, and decision-making.

Fellow: Madison Prause
Mentors: Anna Xiong and Erin Baumgartner
Translational Humanities for Public Health
Translational Humanities for Public Health is a database that highlights a broad range of humanities-based responses to the COVID-19 pandemic from around the world, and enables scholars and students to explore and visualize the pathways from humanities classrooms and research to applied interventions in response to human health crises. A Fondren Fellow will help to interview researchers from around the world for the website; help design new pathways for exploring the data; and help identify new contacts who can contribute to the project worldwide.

Fellows: Arnav Sankaranthi and Surabhi Madadi
Mentor: Kirsten Ostherr
Where Is Texas on the SlaveVoyages Website? Reconstructing the Coastwise Traffic to the Lone Star State in the Nineteenth Century
This project reconstructs the nineteenth century coastwise slave trade to Texas through a database made from manifests and newspaper sources. These data will be uploaded to the Intra-American Slave Trade Database, on SlaveVoyages.org, the world’s premier repository for data on slaving voyages across the Atlantic and within the Americas.

Fellows: Katelyn Landry, James Myers (project manager), Victoria Zabarte, and Ben Schachter
Mentors: Daniel B. Domingues da Silva and Molly Morgan
Research by Members of the Racial Geography Project
This project concerns four investigations being conducted by members of theRacial Geography Project (RGP), an initiative of the Research and Teaching Working Group of the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice thatinvestigates histories of racism and resistance registered in Rice University’s land, buildings, and monuments.

Fellows: Adrienne Rooney (project manager), Venus Alemanji, Marc Armeña, Chaney Hill, Stephen Westich
Mentor: Fabiola López-Durán
Fondren Eco-Rep
Working with Fondren's Green Team and Rice's EcoRep Program, the Fondren Eco-Rep helps to develop and implement sustainability initiatives at the library, such as creating online guides, organizing events, and updating Fondren's sustainability plan.

Fellow: Hong-Ye Wang
Mentor: Lisa Spiro