Empowering Students to Explore
Wesleyan University empowers students to explore a broad range of disciplines and shape a course of study aligned with their passions and interests. Wesleyan students are encouraged to take chances, grapple with big questions, and gain early experience in bringing their education out of the classroom and into the world. CSGS supports student empowerment with innovative courses, real-world research, and opportunities to explore how the history of firearms influences their experience of the world.
Students at the Center of Groundbreaking Research
Since CSGS was founded in 2022, more than 120 Wesleyan students have participated in courses, research, conferences, and internships related to the center. We have created innovative pedagogy and opportunities to conduct research for center projects. CSGS hosts an annual undergraduate research conference and showcases student research at the center’s annual fall conference for professional scholars. Our colleagues are impressed by Wesleyan students and the high-quality of their scholarship at an undergraduate level.
“CSGS has played a crucial role in helping me hone my research skills during my time at Wesleyan! I’m especially grateful to have taken ‘Visualizing Firearms History’ with Profs. Tucker and Gooyabadi, an interdisciplinary course that allowed me to learn statistical programming software while building off of my existing humanities knowledge.”
Sonya Drake ‘26
“Working on the films was the most rewarding part of Reenacting Justice: Guns in America. It was a chance to collaborate creatively with the rest of my classmates while grappling with the complex history of guns and justice in America.”
Cian Mesch ‘25
Courses
CSGS supports several courses at Wesleyan University that center on topics around guns and society.
Explore course descriptions and more below.
Spring 2026
History and Archaeology of Industrial Connecticut
This course will explore the rich history of industrial sites in Middletown and surrounding regions of Connecticut. Students will have opportunities to work with archaeologists and museum professionals as they research local historic and archaeological objects.
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Spring 2026
God & Guns: The History of Faith & Firearms in America
This course examines the history of firearms and religion in the United States, ultimately seeking to understand the significance of gun culture within American Christianity and the powerful “God & Guns” story at the core of many Americans’ identity. (Course also taught spring 2023 – 2025.)
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Spring 2024
Reenacting Justice: Guns in America
Combining oral history, visual storytelling methods, and documentary performance in a workshop format, this course will reenact court transcripts and contemporary and historic testimonies related to guns and gun violence in America.
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Fall 2024
Visualizing Firearms History: An Applied Quantitative and Archival Approach for a Project-Based Exploration
This project-based course provides a unique cross-disciplinary opportunity to study important historical questions surrounding firearms.
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Fall 2023 & 2022
Guns and Society
This course examines the changing place of guns in U.S. society, from the colonial era through to the present day. Readings and discussions consider guns both as material objects involved in specific ways of life and as symbols and sites of contested meaning in American culture.
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Fall 2022
War and Society
This course will examine war as a social, political, and historical phenomenon. We will look at the way in which wars have led to the consolidation of political power and the acceleration of social change, as well as the relationship between military service and the concept of citizenship.
Learn MoreStudent Work
QAC Summer Apprenticeship
In summer 2024, Alex Cavallaro ’25 was a summer apprentice with Wesleyan’s Quantitative Analysis Center. Cavallaro, along with QAC associate director Pavel V. Oleinikov, designed AI-driven search tools for CSGS. One of Cavallaro’s AI tools allowed CSGS researchers to quickly search thousands of pages of Indian-Pioneer Papers, a WPA project of Depression-era interviews. This tool allowed them to quickly identify passages that address guns, weapons, gun violence, etc.
Transcription and Tribal Law: 19th Century Documents from Oklahoma
Allie Pae ’25 spent her senior year working with CSGS to transcribe hand-written documents from the Cherokee and Chickasaw Nations in Oklahoma. The documents ranged from letters to court reports and contribute to our understanding of tribal firearms laws and how these tribes relationships with guns prior to Oklahoma’s statehood in 1907.
Click the gallery image to view the full pages.
Reenacting Justice: Guns in America Short Film
In spring 2024, “Reenacting Justice: Guns in America”” students Chloe Goorman ’24 and Fisher Hirsch ’26 created their short film to address masculine vs. feminine tropes found in American Westerns, while exploring the notion that gun ownership and use was not unfettered in the “Wild West.”
Visualizing Firearms History: An Applied Quantitative and Archival Approach for a Project-Based Exploration
Fall 2024
This project-based course provides a unique cross-disciplinary opportunity to study important historical questions surrounding firearms. Combining quantitative methodology in data science with qualitative research methods in history, students will answer questions of interest using existing datasets.
Students will read, discuss, and write responses to the latest historical scholarship on guns, including technological development, gun violence statistics, and the place of guns in media and advertisements. They will choose one of four datasets to research and analyze. These include data sets related to firearms patents since the 1820s, firearms in media (film, television, anime, games), firearms-related deaths, and advertisements of firearms. Students will develop skills in hypothesis testing and inferential statistical analysis alongside qualitative research methods used in history.
The course offers one-on-one support and training in the skills required to complete a team-based final project, a hybrid between a research paper and an exhibit (e.g., film, website, media, art installation). Students will present their work at the center’s third annual Undergraduate Research Conference in Spring 2025. Select students can apply to continue on as QAC summer apprentices and Baker Collabria Fellows in Data Analysis, and as CSGS NEH-funded summer history research fellows and as history thesis researchers.
Reenacting Justice: Guns in America
Spring 2024
Combining oral history, visual storytelling methods, and documentary performance in a workshop format, this course will reenact court transcripts and contemporary and historic testimonies related to guns and gun violence in America. These reenactments are based on testimonies and documents collected that interpolate the legal issues around guns in the U.S. and the impact of guns on American society especially women, children, and communities of color.
In spring 2024, “Reenacting Justice” students Chloe Goorman ’24 and Fisher Hirsch ’26 created their short film to address masculine vs. feminine tropes found in American Westerns, while exploring the notion that gun ownership and use was not unfettered in the “Wild West.”
God & Guns: The History of Faith & Firearms in America
Spring 2023, Spring 2024 – Taught by Joseph Slaughter
This course examines the history of firearms and religion in the United States, ultimately seeking to understand the significance of gun culture within American Christianity and the powerful “God & Guns” story at the core of many Americans’ identity. Beginning with an overview of colonial and revolutionary-era views of firearms and violence, the course examines the influence of slavery, gender, and the wars of the 20th century, paying special attention to the emergence of a masculine, warrior Jesus within evangelical and fundamentalist communities during the Cold War. Students will be challenged to consider the ways in which this story helps explain one facet of popular support for Donald Trump and to reflect on how firearms are central to the identity of many conservative American Christians.
Guns and Society
Fall 2022, Fall 2023 – Taught by Jennifer Tucker
This course examines the changing place of guns in U.S. society, from the colonial era through to the present day. Readings and discussions consider guns both as material objects involved in specific ways of life and as symbols and sites of contested meaning in American culture. Projects explore how guns have been, and remain, intimately involved with questions of race, gender, class, labor, capital, war, resistance, repression, vigilantism, and ideas of freedom and self-defense. Special emphasis is placed on student research in local archives and museums in the Connecticut River Valley, the nation’s historical gun manufacturing center. This course is accompanied by a research lab (taught separately for .25 credit), designed for students to delve into an individual topic or project with the guidance of a research assistant, postdoc, and/or the professor. This lab will result in a research paper, a theater sketch, a short documentary film, podcast, art project, museum exhibit, oral history project, and/or other project idea to be discussed.
War and Society
Fall 2022 – Taught by Peter Rutland
While most societies condemn physical violence between individuals, they condone and encourage collectively organized violence in the form of warfare. War is obscene, yet all modern societies have engaged in warfare. This course will examine war as a social, political, and historical phenomenon. We will look at the way in which wars have led to the consolidation of political power and the acceleration of social change, as well as the relationship between military service and the concept of citizenship. The course also examines the crucial role played by technology in the interaction between war and society. Films and novels will be examined to test to what extent these literary works accurately reflect, or obscure, the political, social, and technological logic driving the evolution of war. Our examples will include warfare in premodern society, the gunpowder revolution in early modern Europe and Japan, the American Civil War, colonial wars, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq.