From Faculty Funding, a Student Research Opportunity

MacVicar Faculty Fellowships recognize MIT faculty for exemplary contributions to undergraduate education—so it’s not surprising that history professor Anne E.C. McCants turned her fellowship money into a unique opportunity for some of her students. McCants was working to code nearly 1,000 household inventories from low-to-middle-income citizens in 18th-century Amsterdam—an unusual dataset showing consumer habits in relatively poor families. With the MacVicar funds, she was able to hire undergraduates for the work and to retain them for several years, training them in the Dutch language and the documents’ peculiarities. Eventually, she sent two of the students to Amsterdam, where they were able to link the data with additional archival records. “This is not a typical undergraduate research experience,” notes McCants, “and one I could facilitate only on account of having a run of guaranteed funding over a long period of time.”