I am a graduate student and a graduate teaching fellow in the Department of History at the University of Oregon. Prior to joining the department I was a research associate at the Center for History and New Media, at George Mason University. My primary research focuses on U.S. medical and cultural history in the late-19th and 20th century, as well as digital humanities and history education.

I practice a variety of other things in addition to the pursuits mentioned above, including; carpentry, building, drawing & painting, cooking & baking, gardening, and learning electronics.

With Detail

I am interested in questions of personal and national identity and how these constructions interact and conflict with one another. Within this framework I am interested in the roles that formal and informal memory, commemoration, and education play in shaping consciousness. I am drawn to examining how identities change over time and are affected by thematic contexts and the interplay of qualities such as race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, economic condition, and disability. My additional research interests include the history of consumption and production in the United States – with particular focus on the shift to an object economy based on planned obsolescence and the rise of the maker/hacker culture – as well as Americans’ changing interactions with food.

I am consistently drawn to other fields and other disciplines as a means to explore new ways of thinking and communicating ideas. My interest in education permeates all of my scholarly work. I am also very interested in the evolving field of digital humanities and the creative community that is growing around this burgeoning discipline – particularly in the potential for new modes of scholarly communication, teaching & learning, and collaboration.

For the better part of the past three years I worked as the project associate for two Teaching American History grant projects; one with Loudoun County Public Schools, in Virginia and the other with Montgomery County Public Schools, in Maryland. In this capacity, I worked with a splendid team to provide meaningful professional development in U.S. history to elementary and secondary education teachers. (Please see my Vitae for a somewhat more detailed description of my experiences in this role.)

Over the past few years I also learned the rudiments of web design and publishing, became relatively fluent in HTML, CSS, PHP, and JQuery, and honed my skills at image manipulation and print media design. I also have experience planning, designing, and writing online courses in U.S. history; organizing, tracking, and assisting in the writing of federal grant proposals; and working within the Omeka and WordPress content management systems.

My undergraduate education was in history (B.A., magna cum laude) and secondary education in history and the social sciences (Virginia State licensure, with Meritorious New Teacher certification) at the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I completed my undergraduate thesis on the Eugenics Movement and the 1924 Racial Integrity Act in Virginia. My combined interests in history, education, and digital humanities spring from my experiences as an undergraduate and over the past three years at the Center for History and New Media. I look forward to finding new ways of combining my interests as I delve deeper into my historical research and writing.