Affiliates
Alumni
Ken Albers
Former Software Developer and Project Manager
Former Software Developer and Project Manager Ken Albers was a software developer and project manager for RRCHNM from 2005-2021. He started at GMU as graduate student in the doctoral program in history before transitioning his focus to the digital humanities and software development.
Steve Barnes
Former Project Director, Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives
Steven A. Barnes joined the George Mason University faculty in 2004. He received his Ph.D in Russian, Soviet, and East European history from Stanford University in 2003. His dissertation, entitled Soviet Society Confined: The Gulag in the Karaganda Region of Kazakhstan, 1930s-1950s,reconsiders the history of the Soviet system of forced labor concentration camps and internal exile through memoirs and recently opened archives of the Gulag system. He has done field research in Russia and Kazakhstan. Dr. Barnes's research has been published in the journals Slavic Review, Kritika, and International Labor and Working Class History. Dr. Barnes is currently writing a book on the history of the Gulag. Additionally, with the National Parks Service and the Gulag Museum in Perm, Russia, he is working on a traveling museum exhibit on the history of the Gulag opening at Ellis Island in May 2006. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and working with the Center for History and New Media, Dr. Barnes is building a website on the history of the Gulag. Information on both these projects can be found at www.gulaghistory.org.
Lindsey Bestebreurtje
Former Graduate Research Assistant
Jeremy Boggs
Former Associate Director of Research
Jeremy is the Associate Director of Research at CHNM. He is a co-founder of THATCamp, and is the founder and lead developer on ScholarPress. While Jeremy’s strongest skills include CSS and HTML, he also plays well with JavaScript, PHP, Flash and ActionScript, various Adobe programs, and XML. Jeremy's enthusiasm for nicely coded forms and clean stylesheets is matched only by his love of baseball, billiards, juggling, and good card games. Additionally, Jeremy is a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Art History at GMU. His dissertation, entitled “The Designing Historian,” explores design as a methodology for doing digital history. His other research interests include the history of design, the history of technology, and social/cultural history. On his personal website, ClioWeb, Jeremy blogs about how historians can use the electronic form as a tool for academic and educational expression. Jeremy has way too many blog feeds in his newsreader, but if you asked nicely, he'd probably add yours as well.
Sebastian Bondzio
Former Gerda Henkel Postdoc in Digital History
Jordan Bratt
Former DH Fellow
Jordan Bratt is a doctoral student in History at George Mason University and a Graduate Research Assistant at the Center for History and New Media. Jordan was selected as a Digital History Fellow from 2014-2015. He received his bachelor's degree in Geography with an emphasis in Geographic Information Systems from Brigham Young University.
Sheila Brennan
Former Director of Strategic Initiatives
Sheila was the Director of Strategic Initiatives, Acting Director of Public Projects, and Research Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History. She worked at RRCHNM from 2005-2018. She completed her Ph.D. in U.S. history at Mason in 2010. She earned her Bachelor's degree from Bates College and Master's from the University of Notre Dame in American Studies. Prior to coming to RRCHNM in 2005, she worked as the Director of Education and Public Programs at the U.S. Navy Museum in Washington, DC for seven years. Her research interests include public history, digital history, how museums use the web and digital platforms, museums and material culture, memory and memorialization, collecting practices, and US cultural history. She has co-authored essays on teaching the history of technology, doing oral history in the digital age, as well as white papers focused on developing digital public history projects and on increasing digital literacies of mid-career scholars. She has contributed to edited collections, including Debates in Digital Humanities 2016 and two volumes published by Smithsonian Institution Press. Her dissertation, "Stamping American Memory: Stamp Collecting in the U.S. 1880s-1930s," was awarded the 2010 Moroney Prize for Scholarship in Postal History. In 2012, she was awarded the University of Michigan Press-HASTAC Prize for Digital Humanities to create a new web project, Stamping American Memory, an open peer-reviewed, open access digital book and publication with University of Michigan Press. She regularly presents on topics in digital humanities and museums, online collecting, postal history, and public history. She also organizes and run workshops on digital project development and digital methods. She blogs at: Lot 49.
Megan Brett
Former Digital History Associate
Megan R. Brett was a long time Digital History Associate at RRCHNM. She has worked on a number of projects, including creating content for the award-winning Histories of the National Mall website, and acting as coordinating editor for the Papers of the War Department community transcription project. Her specialties at RRCHNM include user experience, accessibility, workshop design and execution, project management, and outreach. Megan earned her Ph.D. in American History from George Mason University; her work examines family strategies and the formation of national identity for Americans abroad in the post-revolutionary period.
Justin Broubalow
Former Graduate Research Assistant
Justin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History and Art History and a graduate research assistant in the Educational Projects Division at RRCHNM. He is a recipient of George Mason University's Presidential Scholarship. Justin studies American history with minor fields in U.S. and the World and U.S. Public Policy. His research interests include statecraft, foreign relations, and policymaking in the administrative state — particularly immigration policy.
John Buescher
Former Senior Researcher
Joshua Catalano
Former Graduate Research Assistant
Joshua Catalano is a research assistant at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and a Ph.D. graduate student in the Department of History. He is a recipient of the department’s Presidential Scholarship. He received his masters degree from Bowling Green State University in American Culture Studies and his bachelors in history from Saint Vincent College. His major research field is American history with minor fields in Early America and Digital History.
Faolan Cheslack-Postava
Former Lead Zotero Developer
Faolan was the lead developer on the Zotero project from 2011-2021.
Kevin Clark
Former Affiliated Faculty
Dan Cohen
Former Director
Former Director Dan Cohen is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Center for History and New Media. His own research is in European and American intellectual history, the history of science (particularly mathematics), and the intersection of history and computing. He is the co-author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and has published articles and book chapters on the history of mathematics and religion, the teaching of history, and the future of history in a digital age in journals such as the Journal of American History, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rethinking History. Dan is an inaugural recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies' Digital Innovation Fellowship. At the Center for History and New Media he has co-directed the September 11 Digital Archive and the Echo project, and has developed software tools for scholars, teachers, and students.
Sara Collini
Former Graduate Research Assistant
Sara Collini is a doctoral student in the Department of History and a Graduate Research Assistant at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. She received her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin and her Master’s degree in U.S. History from George Mason University. Her research interests include women's history, slavery, and health in early America.
Nicole Cook
Former Undergraduate Research Assistant
Rustin Crandall
Former Research Assistant
Laura Crossley
Former Digital History Fellow
Teresa DeFlitch
Former Outreach Coordinator
Susan Douglass
Former Senior Research Associate
Hannah Ehlers
Graduate Research Assistant
Emma Kamara
Graduate Affiliate
Emma Kamara is an author and poet. She is currently pursuing her M.A. in World History at George Mason university. Her work and research focus on intra-community racism within the African diaspora.
Debra Kathman
Former Senior Research Associate
Caroline Kelley
Former Undergraduate Research Assistant
Caroline Kelly is a student at Mason and an undergraduate research assistant at CHNM. She has worked on numerous digital history projects, including researching, editing, and developing content.
Jessica Kilday
Former TAH Project Associate
Shekhar Krishnan
Former Zotero Evangelist
John Flatness
Former Senior Software Developer
John was a software developer at the Center and the lead developer for the Omeka project from 2010-2021. He holds an B.S. in computer science from Virginia Tech and a J.D. from Mason.
Miriam Forman-Brunell
Former Affiliated Faculty
Joan Fragaszy Troyano
Former Research Assistant Professor
Joan Fragaszy Troyano is a Research Assistant Professor and Director of the PressForward project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. With PressForward she is researching the sourcing, evaluating, publishing, and crediting of scholarly communication from the open web. She also edits two experimental publications — Digital Humanities Now and the Journal of Digital Humanities — and oversees the development of the PressForward plugin to facilitate the aggregation, curation, and dissemination of scholarship. Joan is a practicing and teaching public historian with experience working on the September 11 Digital Archive and Echo projects at CHNM, as well as museum exhibition research and education at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and National Portrait Gallery. At Indiana University she studied music performance and earned a BA in History and Latin. Her PhD is in American Studies from George Washington University, where she researched immigration history, visual culture, and public understandings of the past. More information can be found on her personal website.
Alexis Frambes
Former Research Assistant
Alexis Frambes received her B.A. in History, with a concentration in public history, from George Mason University in December 2019, and is pursuing a Master's in Applied History. She currently works as a research associate at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media on two of their ongoing projects, American Religious Ecologies and Pandemic Religion: A Digital Archive. Her previous experience includes an internship with the American Battle Monuments Commission’s Collections and Preservation Directorate; an internship with the National Museum of American History’s Curatorial Division of Military History; and working as a research assistant to Dr. Peter N. Stearns.
Amanda French
Former THATCamp Coordinator
My primary professional interest is in teaching digital methods to humanities scholars. That's an interest I'm currently pursuing as THATCamp Coordinator, contracting independently with CHNM to provide support for THATCamp organizers and fellows, but it's an interest I've also pursued for the Digital History Across the Curriculum project at NYU and as a Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow at NCSU. I earned my doctorate in English from the University of Virginia in 2004, where I encoded texts in TEI for the Rossetti Archive and the Electronic Text Center. My dissertation is a history of the villanelle, the nineteen-line poetic form of Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night"; I am currently at work on a book about the poetics of Twitter.
Alan Gevinson
Former Senior Research Associate
Lee Ann Ghajar
Former Digital History Associate
Lee Ann is in the third year of GMU's Ph.D program in American history with emphasis on nineteenth century southern industry and history and new media. At CHNM, she is working as a digital history associate in the Public Projects Division.
Fred Gibbs
Former Director of Digital Scholarship
Former Director of Digital Scholarship Fred Gibbs is an Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University and Director of Digital Scholarship at the Center for History and New Media. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology in 2009. His research investigates the intersection of natural philosophy, medicine, and the human body throughout the medieval and early modern periods. His first book (in progress) The venomes doo cure the diseases explores how late medieval physicians formulated a range of definitions of poison while debating whether it had an ontological existence apart from other drugs, and how sixteenth century physicians increasingly described the cause of disease as the result of a poison in the body rather than imbalanced humors. At CHNM, he has worked extensively on various Zotero-related projects. His current grant writing efforts focus on creating and utilizing digital tools for innovative research methodologies in history and the humanities.
Boone Gorges
Former Developer
Michele Greet
Art History Program Director and Professor
Art History Program Director and Professor Professor Greet is Full Professor of Art History and affiliated faculty in Latin American Studies, Cultural Studies, Honors, and Women's Studies. She is also president of the Association for Latin American Art. She received her Ph.D. in Modern Latin American art from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2004. Her monograph, Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris between the Wars, 1918-1939, was published with Yale University Press in 2018. To support the research and writing of this manuscript she received a research fellowship from The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. She is also curating a major traveling exhibition on the topic. Her first book, Beyond National Identity: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy in Andean Art, 1920-1960, came out with Penn State University Press’s Refiguring Modernism Series in 2009, and was funded by a Getty Foundation publication grant. Her new research project picks up where this book left off and focuses on the emergence of abstraction in the Andes. Prior to coming to George Mason she worked in various capacities for El Museo del Barrio, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the College Art Association and taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Pratt Institute, Baruch College, Hunter College and the School for Visual Arts in New York City. She has lectured on Mexican muralism, Latin American women artists, the Ecuadorian vanguard, colonial Peruvian art, and Latin American artists in Paris.
James Halabuk
Former Digital History Associate
Janet Hammond
Graduate Affiliate
Janet Hammond is a PhD student at George Mason University and a Digital History Fellow at CHNM. She enjoys historical learning in the digital, museum, and collegiate realms. In the world of public history, her interests lie in how to make narratives more accessible for people with physical disabilities. At other times, she studies British Parliamentary divorce and how the state and gender influenced these laws and cases. She has a MA in History with a concentration in Museum Studies from UNC Greensboro and a BS in Applied and Public History with a Minor in French and Francophone Studies from Appalachian State University.
Alaina Harmon
Former Research Assistant
Lara Harmon-Sutor
Former Senior Research Associate
Caitlin Hartnett
Former Graduate Research Assistant
Katja Hering
Former Research Assistant
Meagan Hess
Former Web Designer
Julia Hoffer
Former grants administrator
Sasha Hoffman
Former Graduate Research Assistant
Stephanie Hurter
Former Web Designer and Project Manager
Ben Hurwitz
Former Digital History Fellow
Jennie Jang
Intern
Jennie Jiang (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She received her B.S. in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology from Emory University in 2019 and served two years as Marketing and Communications Specialist at Global Village Project, a nonprofit school for refugee girls in Atlanta, GA. Her research interests span multiple structures of oppression, including incarceration, immigration enforcement, food injustice, housing inequity, and environmental violence.
JooAh Lee
Junior Developer
Joo Ah Lee is a junior web developer with experience in PHP, CSS, Javascript, and MySQL as well as with Drupal and WordPress. Lee is completing her B.A. in computer science at George Mason University.
Jannelle Legg
Former DH Fellow
Jannelle Legg is a PhD candidate and Graduate Research Assistant at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. She received her BA from the University of Iowa in 2007 and dual MA degrees from Gallaudet University in 2011. In addition to her academic experience, Jannelle was an instructor at Utah Valley University for two years teaching courses about Deaf History in the Department of Languages and Cultures. Her research interests include in Deaf religious history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Kristin Lehner
Former Senior Research Associate
Sharon Leon
Former Director of Public Projects
Sharon M. Leon is an Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University, where she is developing projects on digital public history and is a principal participant in MSU’s Consortium on Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research initiative. She directs the Omeka web publishing project, which includes Omeka Classic, Omeka S, Omeka.net, and Omeka Services. Leon was the Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and Associate Professor of History at George Mason University from 2004-2017 and oversaw collaborations with library, museum, and archive partners from around the country. She received her bachelors of arts degree in American Studies from Georgetown University in 1997, her doctorate in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2004. Her first book, An Image of God: the Catholic Struggle with Eugenics, was published by University of Chicago Press (May 2013).
Katherine Lorio
Former Senior Research Associate
Jessica Mack
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Jessica Mack is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. At RRCHNM, she is the outreach coordinator for Tropy and project manager for Collecting These Times: American Jewish Experiences of the Pandemic and the Pandemic Religion digital collection. A historian of Latin America, Jessica studies the urban history of Mexico City and the history of universities, and she is currently developing a digital campus histories project. She holds a B.A. in History from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University.
Eleanor Magness
Intern
Eleanor Magness majored in History at George Mason University. She is currently an intern for the Green Tunnel Podcast, which explores the history of the Appalachian Trail.
Nashieli Marcano
Graduate Intern
At RRCHNM, Nashieli Marcano is interning on both the Appalachian Trail Histories and the World History Commons digital projects. Nashieli is currently the Graduate Librarian for the Humanities & Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University. Her research interests include information fluency, the role of librarians in DH research teams, and post-colonial Caribbean studies. She holds a PhD from the U. of Pittsburgh in Latin American languages, cultures, and literatures.
Daisy Martin
Former Director of History Education, Teachinghistory.org
Former Director of History Education, Teachinghistory.org Martin is a former high school history and civics teacher who served as co-director of the Stanford History Education Group. She earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Teacher Education in History and Social Science Education in 2005 with a dissertation entitled “Teaching for Historical Thinking: Teacher Conceptions, Practices, and Constraints.” She recently co-directed Historical Thinking Matters, serves as teaching consultant with professional development efforts organized by the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, and teaches history teacher-candidates. She has worked with elementary, middle, and high school teachers in TAH grants in California, Nebraska, Ohio, and Tennessee, and led professional development workshops funded by NEH, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Teachers for a New Era project at Stanford. Current projects include creating classroom ready resources for teaching historical problems and researching teacher practices and conceptions relevant to this kind of teaching. Her publications include articles in The History Teacher (forthcoming) and Educational Leadership.
Kristin Martin
Former Project Manager
Ron Martin
Former Digital History Associate
Ron Martin is an Assistant Editor of the Papers of the War Department and content provider for the National Park Service War of 1812 website. Martin is a former Marine infantry officer and a doctoral student in History at George Mason. He is interested in the military and naval history of the Early American Republic.
Jeny Martinez
Former Office Manager
Former Office Manager Jeny graduated from George Mason University with a B.A in Psychology and is currently working on a Masters in Counseling. She has been working at the center as for 3 years. She manages the center's everyday tasks as well as panning events such as THATCamp and One Week One Tool.
Roberto Martinez
Former Developer
Jessica May
Former Research Assistant
Dan Maxwell
Former Research Assistant
James McCartney
Former Senior Software Developer
Jeff McClurken
Former Affiliated faculty
Jeffrey W. McClurken is Associate Professor and Chair of History and American Studies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA. His research areas include the history of veterans, families, gender, the Pinkertons, mental institutions, the 19th-Century American South, and the digital humanities. [These are fields that overlap more than you might think . . . .] He teaches classes on a wide array of US History topics, including American technology and culture, digital history, women's history, and TED.com. His book, Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing the Confederate Veteran Family in Virginia, was released by UVA Press in 2009. His interest in the digital humanities began while programming his Commodore 64 using a cassette tape drive in the 1980s, but really took off when he entered census data and hand-coded HTML for the Valley of the Shadow project in the mid-1990s. He has been involved in digital pedagogy since making his students hand code HTML in the early years of the 2000s. He blogs at Techist, tweets from @jmcclurken, and Zoteros at zotero.org/jmcclurken. Links to his classes and presentations can be found at http://mcclurken.org.
Anne McDivitt
Former Digital History Fellow
Mary McMurray
Former Project Manager
Dana Meyer
Former Digital History Fellow
Amanda Morton
Former DH Fellow
Vinit Muchhala
Former Assistant Webmaster
Sameera Mudigon
Former Developer
Abby Mullen
Research Assistant Professor
Abby Mullen is a Research Assistant Professor at RRCHNM, where she works primarily on Tropy. She has a PhD in world history from Northeastern University in Boston.
Rikk Mulligan
Former Web Developer
Patrick Murray-John
Former Research Assistant Professor
Dr. Patrick Murray-John received a B.S. in Mathematics from Iowa State University, and a M.A. in English and a Ph.D. in Anglo-Saxon Literature from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He taught literature and writing at both the University of Mary Washington and at the University of Richmond. In 2006 he became an Instructional Technology Specialist at the University of Mary Washington. In that role, he learned to develop code to augment the WordPress, Drupal, and Omeka content management systems in close collaboration with faculty to meet their teaching and research goals. He joined the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media as a web developer and Research Assistant Professor in 2011, and is now the Omeka Development Team Manager. He also currently serves on the THATCamp Council, THATCamp's newly-formed governance body. Patrick's interest in pursing creative uses of technology for the humanities has led him to pursue many projects beyond regular development of Omeka. He participated in the One Week | One Tool summer institute at RRCHNM in 2010, which built the WordPress plugin Anthologize. He also won the Modern Language Association's New Variorum Challenge in 2012 for “Bill-Crit-O-Matic”, a site that restructured the TEI of their edition of “The Comedy of Errors” into an Omeka site. His most recent project is “U.S. Museums Explorer”, an Omeka site that fosters discovery of local museums based on location and other factors.
Kim Nguyen
Former Lead Web Designer
Kim Nguyen worked in front-end web design and development at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media from 2011-2021. She received her BFA in Visual Communications Design from Virginia Tech in 2010 and works primarily with HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP.
Brianna Nuñez
Former Research Assistant
Brianna graduated from George Mason University where she received her dual Bachelor's degree in History and Government/ International Politics. Her interests include Medieval England and early American history.
Allison O'Connor
Former Project Manager
Megan Ober
Former Office Manager
Andrea Odiorne
Former Digital History Fellow
Eric Olson
Former Outreach Coordinator, PressForward Project
Eric was the Outreach Coordinator for the PressForward project. He consults with science organizations in order to facilitate their high-quality publications on the web. Other projects include an upcoming journal publication focused on the role of media cultivation on cultural identity and curating documents and interviews related to civil disobedience in 1960s Chicago. He is also the director of the Science Communication Network Initiative, a unique collaborative effort hosted by the National Science Communication Institute. He is an member of the Open Scholarship Initiative organizing committee for the 2016 and 2017 annual meetings, and was an event coordinator for the 2016 meeting at George Mason University. Olson has presented projects at a number of national conferences, including the annual meetings of the National Communication Association, National Association for Media Literacy Education, the International Conference on Data Preservation, and the Science of Team Science Annual Meeting. He has also taught introductory film courses at the college level and media literacy courses to parents and children. Olson earned his bachelor's degree in Communication and a graduate certificate in science communication at Mason and a master's degree in communication at Virginia Tech.
Jon Olsen
Former Editor, Making the History of 1989
Olsen received his BA in History, German, and Russian-Soviet Studies from St. Olaf College in 1993 and an M.A. in German and European Studies from Georgetown University in 1997. After his time at Georgetown, he received a Robert Bosch Fellowship and was able to work for a member of the German Parliament and for the House of History (one of Germany's national history museums). Upon returning to the United States, Olsen earned a Ph.D. in German History from the University of North Carolina in 2004. He is currently revising his book manuscript, entitled "Tailoring Truth: Memory Culture and State Legitimacy in East Germany." His research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the Robert Bosch Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the US Department of Education. At CHNM, Olsen is the editor of the "Making the History of 1989" project. Olsen is also active in promoting the use of new technologies in his role as one of editors of H-German, an online scholarly network of scholars of German history and German studies. Outside academia, he is also the Dean of Waldsee, a summer German language and culture immersion program of Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota.
Trevor Owens
Community Lead and Manager
Dr. Trevor Owens the first Head of Digital Content Management at the Library of Congress. He is also a Public Historian in Residence at American University, and a lecturer for the University of Maryland’s College of Information, where he is also a Research Affiliate with the Center for Archival Futures. At RRCHNM, Owens was the Community Lead for the Zotero project for many years.
Ashley Palazzo
Graduate Affiliate
Ashley Palazzo is a graduate student at George Mason University and an affiliate for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. She was an intern for RRCHNM during the summer of 2021. She is currently working on The Green Tunnel Podcast project at RRCHNM as a podcast producer for one of the episodes. Ashley earned her bachelor's degree in history education from Missouri State University in 2018. She is currently working towards her graduate degree in History and a graduate certificate in Digital Public Humanities from George Mason University. Ashley has an interest in digital archiving and is fostering her interest in podcast production with her current work with RRCHNM.
Anthony Pellegrino
Former Affiliated faculty
Anthony Pellegrino is an assistant professor of social studies/history education in the Secondary Education Program at George Mason University. His research interests include pre-service history education and using music in secondary history/social studies classrooms. Pellegrino is the co-author of the forthcoming book Harnessing the Power of Music to Engage Students in History and the Social Studies (Information Age Publishing, 2011) and has published articles related to the teaching of history, reflective education, and pedagogy for pre-service teachers.
Erin Peters Burton
Former Affiliated faculty
Dr. Erin E. Peters Burton is an Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology and Science Education at George Mason University. Her research interests include cognition of science, self-regulation of scientific epistemologies, social justice in science education, and assessment of nature of science knowledge. Her research agenda is derived from 15 years of experience as an electrical engineer, a secondary science teacher, and an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Dr. Peters Burton has published over 20 empirical articles, several book chapters and a nationally distributed book on metacognitive prompting of the nature of science. She has won several national and state awards including Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching, VAST’s Outstanding Middle School Science Teacher Award, Excellence in Teacher Research by the Virginia Association of Teacher Educators, and Virginia University Educator by the Virginia Association of Science Teachers.
Paula Petrik
Former Associate Director
Paula Petrik received her Ph.D. from SUNY-Binghamton in 1982 and MFA from the University of Montana. She is the author of No Step Backward: Women and Family on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier and co-editor (with Elliott West) of Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950. Recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to the United Kingdom, an NEH Fellowship, an Apple Computer Faculty Internship, and a Smithsonian Fellowship, among others, she has published articles on women in the American West, the U.S. toy industry, and new media. She has taught courses in U.S. trans-Mississippi West, U.S. business history, and history and new media.
Jens Pohlmann
Former Gerda Henkel Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital History
Jens Pohlmann was the Gerda Henkel Fellow in Digital History for 2018-19 at the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. and at RRCHNM. Furthermore, he is an Associate Researcher at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin. Jens received his PhD from Stanford University in 2017 with a thesis on the marketing strategies of avant-garde authors in the German public sphere. From 2017 to 2018, he taught at Stanford as a lecturer, and he was CESTA Graduate Research Fellow 2015-16. Currently, he is co-organizing the “Transatlantic Sync Conference 2019 – Germany & The US in the Era of Technological Revolution” sponsored by the Deutschlandjahr initiative “Wunderbar together”.
Emily Purdue
Former Research Assistant
Chris Preperato
Former Multimedia and Database Manager
Chris Preperato was a senior multimedia and database manager at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. He earned his B.A. in Communication Arts from Allegheny College, specializing in Video Production. In addition to his work at RRCHNM, Chris is the creator of A History of the Upper Yough, a documentary and written history of the boating community at the Upper Youghiogheny River in western Maryland, which was awarded first place at the National Paddling Film Festival. He has showcased his outdoor adventure documentaries at film festivals across the country.
Jess Pritchard-Ritter
Graduate Intern
Graduate Intern Jess is a graduate student in the Digital Public Humanities program. She received her B.A. in English from Virginia Tech and her M.A. in English from George Mason University. Her research interests include Virginia history, particularly local stories that aren't as widely known. She's currently working with Belle Grove Plantation to research the mysterious death of Hettie Cooley in 1861 and the subsequent trial of her enslaved woman, Harriet Robinson, who was ultimately convicted of murder. She is currently working on Pandemic Religions and will be working on the Appalachian Trail Project in Spring 2021.
Andy Privee
Former Associate Director for Management
Andy Privee is the Budget and Grants Administrator at the Center. He has had an extensive and interesting career managing budgets for the U.S. Peace Corps and the Environmental Protection Agency. He has traveled extensively and was stationed while with Peace Corps in India, Fiji Islands, and The Federated States of Micronesia. Beyond administering budgets, his outdoor passions include spelunking and running marathons.
Chris Raymond
Former Senior Web Designer / Creative Lead
Chris has diverse experience creating effective, award-winning visual communications as a graphic designer, web designer, science museum exhibit researcher/writer, science journalist, and publications director for an association of hands-on science museums. After receiving a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, Chris earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University with emphasis in mass media and sociology of science; her dissertation examined coverage of occupational health in the mainstream and alternative press. In the first half of her professional career, Chris was a researcher/writer at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry; an editor at JAMA Medical News; an editor covering social science at the Chronicle of Higher Education; a freelance writer published in such magazines as Psychology Today and Health; and publications director at the Association of Science-Technology Centers. Her writing was recognized with numerous awards from organizations including the Chicago Medical Writers Association and the American Psychological Association; Chris also received two fellowships, from the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism. After developing an interest in the visual side of communication, Chris studied design at VCU, and worked as a designer and art director at two design studios, and as a freelance contract designer, during which time she worked on print and web projects for clients including the National Science Foundation, NIH, and AARP. Her work as a print and web designer has been recognized by the DC-area Art Directors Club and the Society of Technical Communicators, among others. Chris believes in the power of information hierarchy, content planning, and content strategy to inform designs that communicate in a compelling way; “design from the content out” has become her mantra in the age of responsive design. Outside of work, Chris takes printmaking and crafts workshops, collects new and vintage wind-up toys, push puppets, and metal tins, and plays a mean game of basketball. Under the umbrella of www.girlmeetsart.com, she creates and writes about crafty projects and the creative process.
Elena Razlogova
Former Affiliated Scholar
Former Affiliated Scholar Elena Razlogova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Concordia University in Montreal. She co-directs the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia and directs the Concordia Digital History Lab at the Centre. Prior to her current job she worked at CHNM for ten years as a webmaster. At CHNM, she is the Associate Producer of Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives. At Concordia, she also works on utilities for collaborative media and biographical research in CHNM's open source tool, Zotero. Her own research focuses on the ways ordinary Americans perceived, interacted with, and shaped large cultural and political institutions. She has published articles on true crime radio listening in American Quarterly and (with Lisa Lynch) on public views of U.S. detention practices at Guantanamo in an online multimedia journal Vectors. Her book, The Listener's Voice: A Story of Radio, Reciprocity and Greed, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2008.
Jenny Reeder
Former Graduate Research Assistant
Jenny is a PhD student in American History, with emphasis in women's history and religious history. Her particular interest is Mormon women's history. She has an MA from New York University in history, archival management, and historical editing. She has worked at the New York Historical Society, the Brooklyn Museum Archives, the American Jewish Historical Society, the NYC 4th Universalist Church Archive, the LDS Church Archive, and the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for LDS History. At CHNM, Jenny is working with Zotero, ECHO, and Edsitement.
Amanda Regan
Former Digital History Fellow
Amanda Regan is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and a Graduate Research Assistant at the Center for History and New Media. Amanda was a Digital History Fellow CHNM from 2013-2015. She is currently a research assistant on the PressForward project and one of the Managing Editors of Digital Humanities Now. Amanda received both her BA and MA degrees from California State University San Marcos in 2011 and 2013. Her dissertation is tentatively titled "Shaping Up: Physical Fitness Initiatives for Women in the United States" and will examine how and why officials perceived a connection between women's bodies and national security between 1900 and 1965.
Lisa Rhody
Former Associate Director of Research
Will Riley
Former Web Programmer
Spencer Roberts
Former Digital History Fellow
Matt Romaniello
Former Senior Research Associate
Jennifer Rosenfeld
Former Associate Director of Educational Projects
Jennifer has worked extensively in the field of public history as a museum educator, deputy executive director, and consultant. At CHNM, her interests include teacher training, outreach, and thinking about how people interact with the past online. Jennifer has presented workshops about historical thinking and technology in the classroom at national conferences including the National Council for the Social Studies, National Social Studies Supervisors Association, American Historical Association, National Council on History Education, and the International Society of Technology in Education, among others. She also serves as adjunct faculty for Mason’s Arts Management program teaching a course on Technology in the Arts. Jennifer holds a B.A. in history from the College of William and Mary and an M.A. in history museum studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program at SUNY-Oneonta.
Adam Rothman
Former Senior Scholar
Tom Rushford
Former Senior Research Associate
Jim Safley
Former Senior Software Developer and Metadata Specialist
Former Senior Software Developer and Metadata Specialist Jim Safley was a software developer and metadata specialist for the Center from 2002-2021. He received his undergraduate degree in history at GMU and was working towards his master's degree in American history before focusing on software development. Beginning his career in 1999 at the National Archives and Records Administration, Jim moved through several related positions, including records manager at Phi Beta Kappa national headquarters and archivist assistant at GMU's Special Collections and Archives. Arriving at CHNM in 2002, Safley applied his traditional archiving experience to his work in digital collections management, web programming, and database administration. His professional interests include metadata standards, database design, web technologies, progressive history, and history of technology.
Mark Sample
Former Affiliated Faculty
Roberto Sanchez
Former Systems Administrator
Tom Scheinfeldt
Former Director-at-Large
Ben Schneider
Former Graduate Research Assistant
Zachary Schrag
Former Affiliated Faculty
Celeste Sharpe
Former GRA
Ammon Shepherd
Former Associate Director of Technology, Systems Administrator
Ammon graduated magna cum laude from Arizona State University with a B.A. in History and a B.A. in German in 2003. He took a year off from school to increase his computer hardware and programming skills at a local K-12 charter school. The combination of technology and teaching increased his already nascent desires to merge the fields of technology and history. After finding George Mason University's Center for History and New Media via a Google search for "analytical history", he knew that GMU was the place to seek his advanced degrees. In 2007, Ammon received an M.A. in History. He is currently working on a PhD in History at GMU. His dissertation will put together the history of Nazi's underground dispersal projects (nazitunnels.org). Ammon's interests include religion, aviation and society in modern Germany, using the World Wide Web and other computer technologies to present, teach, and learn history, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning History. Ultimately, Ammon would like to teach at the university level while being involved with a group such as the Center for History and New Media as a Digital Historian. He has worked at the Center for History and New Media since January 2006, first as a GRA, and now as Associate Director of Technology.
Amanda Shuman
Former Developer
Stephanie Seal
Former Digital History Fellow
Rwany Sibaja
Former Senior Research Associate
James Sparrow
Former Postdoctoral Fellow
Jim Sparrow is an Associate Professor of History, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. From 1999-2001 he was a postdoctoral fellow in digital history at RRCHNM.
Peter Stearns
Former Senior Scholar
Allison Stowers
Graduate Research Assistant
An incoming second year PhD student at Mason, Allison earned her Master's in Education from Shenandoah University in 2018. She serves on the board of the McCormick Civil War Institute, and her historical research focuses on religion and sexuality in nineteenth century America. She is excited to be working on the Institute of Digital Methods for Military History.
Peter Strong
Former Research Assistant
Sean Takats
Former Director of Research Projects
Alyssa Toby Fahringer
Former DH Fellow & Graduate Research Assistant
Alyssa is a PhD candidate in American history with minor fields in digital humanities and public history. Her research interests are late nineteenth and early twentieth century disasters, Reconstruction, the political, social, and cultural lives of freedpeople in the South during Reconstruction, and memory and memorialization in public spaces. Alyssa is currently working on her dissertation, which is tentatively titled "'With All Her Sad Disasters, What Do We See in this City?': Reconstruction, Race, and the Politics of Disaster in Richmond, 1870-1918." Her dissertation examines three disasters that occurred in Richmond in 1870 and uses them as a lens to understand the history of the city in the Reconstruction era as well as the public memory of the disasters. She was selected to be a Digital History Fellow at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media for the 2014-15 academic year, and currently works there as a Graduate Research Assistant.
Adam Turner
Former Project Associate, Teaching American History
Adam Turner was the project associate for Foundations of U.S. History, the Teaching American History Grant for Loudoun County Public Schools, as well as for Conflict and Consensus, the Teaching American History Grant for Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Mary Washington in 2007 with a B.A. in History and a secondary education license in History and Social Sciences with a Meritorious New Teacher Designation. He completed his undergraduate thesis on the Eugenics Movement and the 1924 Racial Integrity Act in Virginia during the early twentieth century. Research interests include the development of history education and cultural memory, twentieth-century U.S. cultural history, and the history of conflict resolution.
Misha Vinokur
Former Research Assistant
Eleanor LaQuanda Walters Cooper
Graduate Student Affiliate
LaQuanda Walters Cooper is a PhD student in the Department of History and Art History at Mason and from 2018-2020 was a graduate research assistant at RRCHNM. She is currently a Humanities Administrator in the Division of Education Programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ellen Weintraub
Former Research Assistant
Stephanie Westcott
Former Research Assistant Professor
Jeri Wieringa
Former Graduate Research Assistant
Gwendolyn White
Former Project Manager
Corinne Wilkinson
Former Digital History Fellow
Julius Wilm
Former Gerda Henkel Postdoc in Digital History
Julius Wilm was the Gerda Henkel Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital History 2019-2020 at the Roy Rosenzweig Center and the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. Julius completed his PhD in Anglo-American History at the University of Cologne in 2016. His dissertation focused on free land policies in the U.S. antebellum West and how they shaped native-settler relations. A revised and extended version of his thesis was published as Settlers as Conquerors (Stuttgart, 2018). Julius has taught US history at the Universities of Copenhagen and Lucerne. In his new project, Julius turns to the analysis of land appropriation in the American West of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During his time at the GHI and the Roy Rosenzweig Center, he works on a database and a web map that combines quantitative data on homesteading between the Civil War and the First World War, thus making the economic, social and racial dimensions of America’s most famous settlement law more tangible. Julius is simultaneously working on a publication on the advantages and disadvantages of digitized source collections and digital research methods for doing history.
