History major Rachel Luehrs has been accepted to the prestigious SHEAR/Mellon Summer Seminar. This program awards ten highly competitive fellowships annually to rising college seniors who are preparing for research on their senior theses at liberal arts colleges. Students who are accepted join a summer program “dedicated to providing talented, motivated undergraduate scholars the opportunity to pursue original primary source research in some of the finest archival collections relevant to early American history.”
As a member of this program, Luehrs will travel to Philadelphia this summer to pursue her research while working under the guidance of leading historians at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Luehrs’ study focuses upon the agency of disenfranchised people such as women and African Americans during the Early Republic. Of the research she has already completed and her upcoming plans, Luehrs notes, “I have encountered many entertaining stories on how these individuals manipulated the very systems which were meant to limit them to gain a sense of power over their lives and surroundings. Through my research in Philadelphia I plan to study what opportunities existed for women in a large northern city and for African Americans in a city which had one of the largest free African American populations.”
Dr. Will Mackintosh, who has guided Ms. Luehrs in her research thus far, will serve as her thesis advisor at the Department of History at UMW this coming fall.