History Department Ramps up Internships and Hands-On Opportunities
Image by Collin Powers
History major Collin Powers and a partner at a Roman archaeological dig near Lienz, Austria, where they excavated a room with a wall oven.
03/13/2025
By Katharine Webster
Senior history major Collin Powers, who has taken every class on ancient Roman history that UMass Lowell offers, spent a month last summer on an archaeological dig near Lienz, Austria, the site of the ancient Roman city of Aguntum.
By the time he and a partner had finished excavating a 12-foot-by-12-foot room in a home near the ancient city’s forum, they had found an intact wall oven, some floor tiles and a Roman coin from the second or third century A.D. that will go into the site’s museum, he says.
“That was a really cool find,” says Powers, who is from Tewksbury, Massachusetts, and has already started on his Master of Education in Curriculum and Instruction in History through the Bachelor’s-to-Master’s program.
Image by Collin Powers
The room in the ancient Roman city of Aguntum near the beginning of the excavation.
The cost of the trip was about $4,600 for everything, including travel, room and board, Powers says. But the History Department and the College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences each chipped in $500 and Powers earned eight credits, bringing the cost in line with tuition for the same number of credits on campus.
Powers’ summer experience was part of a concerted effort by History Department History Department faculty to create, find and help to fund a wider range of hands-on, career-connected opportunities for students and prepare them for top graduate programs, says Assistant Professor Jane Sancinito, a specialist in ancient Roman history who encouraged Powers to apply for the dig.
“We’ve been really trying to get together opportunities for our students to at least be funded so it’s value-neutral,” she says.
Among those efforts have been recruiting and offering some financial support to students who go on history-themed Honors College study abroad programs, created and led over the past three years by senior adjunct faculty member Lauren Fogle. Powers traveled to Scotland and England with Fogle during the first program, in summer 2022.
Last year, the History Department also began paying the dues for all history majors to join Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honor society, says Associate Professor Abby Chandler. The honor society has a journal that publishes student research papers, and it hosts regional and national conferences, to which the history department has sent many students.
“We encourage all our students to think of themselves as part of the broader community of scholars who study history, and this is an important way to do that,” Chandler says.
History majors have long had opportunities to do research with faculty, perform archival research at the university’s Center for Lowell History and other historical societies in the region, and work with ethnic groups in Lowell to document their history as immigrants, refugees and new citizens.
Image by K. Webster
History majors Dylan Stein, left, and Aldwin Gonzalez-Leonardo relax in the History Department's student lounge.
Students also have a growing list of opportunities to intern at history nonprofits, museums and national parks, including the Lowell National Historical Park and the Tsongas Industrial History Center, an educational partnership between the park and UMass Lowell’s School of Education.
Honors history major Dylan Stein organized some of the medical archives at the Center for Lowell History, part of the university library system that is located downtown in a national park building. It features everything from Lowell native Jack Kerouac’s papers to engineering plans for Lowell’s textile mills and bridges.
“If you’re a big fan of the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution … you have access to a bunch of incredible historic research here,” Stein says.
Now Stein is interning at the historical society in his hometown of Winchester, Massachusetts, working with its collection of firefighting equipment from the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Both experiences have spurred Stein’s interest in working as an archivist after earning a master’s in history in either Massachusetts or Australia, where most of his ancestors arrived as British convicts several generations ago.
Image by K. Webster
Assistant Professor Jane Sancinito, left, and honors history major Campbell Tacey look at some reproduction Roman coins.
He did research on the British government’s relations with the aboriginal people of Australia and New Zealand through a capstone seminar with Professor Christoph Strobel, the department chair, whose research includes the colonization of indigenous peoples in North America and other parts of the world.
“You have more one-on-one time with professors here than you would get at a larger university,” says Stein, who plans to work as an archivist before deciding whether to go on for a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) and become a professor himself.
“The professors in general have all helped me with advice about what I should do, how best to implement career opportunities, or what I should do for particular projects,” he says.
Campbell Tacey, president of the campus History Club and an Honors College student, is also reaping the benefits of working alongside faculty.
Tacey applied for and received a $2,500 scholarship through the Emerging Scholars Program to do research with Sancinito into coins used in the third century A.D. in Antioch, the third-largest city in the Roman Empire. It’s her first experience of analyzing objects, rather than documents, for historical information.
“Getting to learn hands-on with an individual project was so appealing to me,” she says of the research, which has taken her to the Yale University Art Gallery to examine both genuine and counterfeit Antiochian coins.
Tacey is applying to master’s degree programs in history and education.
