| Project # | Faculty | Department | Project Title | Project Summary |
| 1 | David Urban | English | John Milton and C. S. Lewis: Influence and Bibliography | I’m hoping a student can work alongside me on two related projects:
FIRST, to help me develop a blog related to my book project, C. S. Lewis, Miltonist: The Influence of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” on Lewis’s Creative and Apologetic Imagination. SECOND, to work alongside me in assembling my annual comprehensive report of scholarship (articles, monographs, and collections of essays) written about the great English author John Milton (1608-74), in this case covering publications from the year 2025, for The Year’s Work in English Studies (YWES), a journal published by Oxford University Press. I am an editor for YWES, and I am responsible for the annual review of Milton scholarship, which involves organizing, summarizing, and evaluating well over a hundred works of scholarship within a comprehensive review essay. |
| 2 | Kevin Timpe | Philosophy | Philosophical Publishing: Shepherding Projects from Vision to Completion | Two of Calvin's philosophy faculty (Kevin Timpe and Rebecca DeYoung) are currently working to make final revisions to book projects (Disabled Agency and An Integrated Life: Ethics as Formation, respectively) during the summer of 2026. The primary task of this McGregor project is helping prepare the manuscripts for final submission to their respective presses. The McGregor fellow will get an intimate look at the writing, editing, and publication process of scholarly texts. The McGregor fellow will also work with the philosophy faculty on other long-term projects, e.g., developing a grant proposal for the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and the Common Good funding opportunities, drawing on the Calvin philosophy department's history of philosophy as a way of life and educating for shalom; promotion of the new medical humanities minor; redesign of design of departmental public promotional materials. |
| 3 | Craig Hanson | Historical Studies | Frank Lloyd Wright’s Meyer and Sophie May House: Sources and Documents | The Meyer and Sophie May house (1909-11) in Grand Rapids is one of the best preserved of all Wright’s Prairie style houses. It was constructed toward the end of an incredibly prolific period for Wright, who designed over 100 houses in less than a decade. Meticulously restored by Steelcase in the mid-1980s, it continues to serve as a model of historic house preservation today.
This McGregor project will focus on compiling and editing primary sources for better understanding what the house meant to its owners, Meyer and Sophie May. Meyer ran a successful menswear shop (buttressed by a significant national network), and Sophie was the daughter of David and Hattie Amberg and granddaughter of Julius Houseman (who served as the city’s mayor before being elected to Congress). Meyer and Sophie were prominent members of Temple Emmanuel and moved in the city’s philanthropic circles. Mention of the Mays appear throughout the city’s newspapers, and there are potentially rich archival sources for better understanding the couple’s personal networks in various repositories.
Research will also consider social history in Grand Rapids in the years around 1910, with an aim toward better understanding what daily life would have been like at the May house, especially in terms of the life of servants in the period. |
| 4 | Sung Soo Lim | Politics and Economics | Aspirational Optimism in Economic Development | Conventional theories of economic development emphasize institutions, resources, and technology as the primary determinants of long-run outcomes. Inclusive institutions are said to foster investment, innovation, and sustained development, while extractive institutions predict stagnation and crisis. Yet the global record presents a persistent puzzle. Several countries—including South Korea, China, Dubai (UAE), India, and Brazil—pursued ambitious development strategies under deep uncertainty, animated by strong beliefs that deliberate action could reshape their futures. Despite similar aspirations, their outcomes diverged sharply. This contrast raises a central question: why has optimism translated into sustained economic development in some societies, while in others it drifted into wishful expectation, limiting long-run progress despite comparable ambition?
This project advances a complementary framework centered on aspirational optimism: the belief, shared by individuals, firms, and governments, that deliberate effort, planning, and institutional design can progressively reduce the influence of uncontrollable forces shaping economic outcomes. Aspirational optimism differs fundamentally from wishful expectation. While both involve hopeful beliefs about the future, aspirational optimism is grounded in agency. It motivates sustained investment in learning, coordination, and credibility because actors believe their actions can meaningfully narrow uncertainty. Wishful expectation, by contrast, assumes favorable conditions will persist without continual discipline, leaving development fragile and prone to reversal. The project also examines Dubai and the Gulf states as a distinctive case, where aspirational optimism operates less through industrial deepening than through credibility, predictability, and systematic uncertainty reduction for globally mobile capital and labor. Across all cases, the key distinction is not optimism versus pessimism, but whether optimism is continually disciplined by institutions that make effort consequential and progressively reduce the role of uncontrollable forces. |
| 5 | Mark Mulder | Sociology | Sewer Socialism and Christianity: A Biography of Mayor Frank Zeidler | Mayor Frank Zeidler governed the City of Milwaukee for three consecutive terms from 1948 to 1960. The project proposed here will consider a spiritual biography of Zeidler’s life. The surprising aspect of Zeidler’s story is the fact that he was a beloved mayor of an industrial Great Lakes city while being a card-carrying member of the Socialist Party of America. In fact, Zeidler found himself in the lineage of “sewer socialists” who governed in Milwaukee from 1892-1960. Sometimes also known as “constructive socialism,” the movement sought reform rather than revolution and focused on delivering good sanitation, clean water, and quality education to its citizens. Zeidler was also, though, a committed Lutheran. In fact, he found great animation in his Lutheran faith. And he understood it as synergistic with his political identity—indeed, he noted that he felt his Lutheran religious commitment was fulfilled by his socialist convictions and activism. After concluding his terms as Milwaukee mayor, Zeidler also accepted the nomination of the Socialist Party for U.S. Presidential candidate in 1976.
Though not well-known in the rest of the country, Zeidler stands as an out-sized figure in Milwaukee. In 2026, our perspective might register some incredulity that a socialist (since the term is often used as an insult) could be a three-term mayor of a major U.S. city. Perhaps even more unbelievable for many of us in 2026 is the fact that Zeidler understood his religious faith and commitment to socialism not as a contradiction but as a natural and complementary fit. Zeidler frequently discussed his commitments to Lutheranism and socialism in ways that would be illuminating for a 21st century audience that seems to have lost the thread on the manners in which citizens benefit from public investments. |
| 6 | Katie Good | Communication | The student voice on AI: A survey of U.S. high school and college student publications in a time of technological emergence | A growing body of research seeks to understand the social and educational impacts of AI, but relatively few studies have focused on students' perspective on the technology as it arrives in their learning environments, technologies, and social lives. This project will take a novel approach to the study of Generative AI by gathering and analyzing student-authored publications about the technology that have been published in high school- and college newspapers, national publications, blogs, and other venues since the technology's widespread uptake by students in 2023. Taking a social constructivist approach to technology, the project aims to gather primary sources and identify patterns in people's discourses, observations, hopes, and fears about technology in the period of its emergence and dissemination within educational settings.
The resulting study will be a submission to the "Wisdom in the Age of AI" conference at Calvin in Fall 2026 as well as an article submission to a peer-reviewed journal in critical information and technology studies.
The McGregor Fellow can expect to spend most of the project period gathering, organizing, analyzing, and writing about student newspaper editorials and related publications about AI, as well as reviewing and annotating academic literature on the subject. The student may be asked, in addition, to aid the project mentor on additional research projects on the history of technology, as time allows. The student should be a strong writer with interests in technology, history, education, learning, society, and culture. This project would be ideal for a student majoring in Communication, English, History, Philosophy, or Education, but it is open to all majors with strong writing and analytical skills. |
| 7 | Eric Araújo | Computer Science | Teaching Ancient Wisdom with Modern AI: Evaluating LLMs in Early Christian Studies | Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly become ubiquitous tools for knowledge synthesis and information retrieval. Yet their reliability in specialized historical and theological domains remains largely unexamined. This project addresses a critical gap: How accurate are LLMs when discussing early Christian figures and events (1st–6th centuries)? By systematically evaluating LLM outputs against authoritative historical sources, we aim to establish benchmarks for trustworthy AI use in religious studies and provide scholars with evidence-based guidance on where these tools succeed and where they fail.
The early Christian period is an ideal domain for this investigation. It encompasses rich theological, historical, and political complexity—from the New Testament canon's formation to doctrinal controversies like the Nicene conflict—yet remains relatively constrained in scope. Moreover, it features extensive primary source material and centuries of scholarly consensus, allowing rigorous comparison between AI-generated claims and established historical knowledge. The stakes are high: uncritical reliance on LLMs in religious scholarship could propagate misinformation about foundational Christian figures like Augustine, Jerome, and Athanasius. This project contributes to responsible AI use in the humanities by providing empirical evidence of LLM limitations in specialized knowledge domains. It models a replicable methodology for evaluating AI systems in other historical and theological contexts. For students, it offers hands-on experience in critical AI assessment, source evaluation, and interdisciplinary research bridging computer science and religious studies. |