Sheila Brennan: Sheila is the Director of Strategic Initiatives and Research Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History. She has worked at RRCHNM since 2005, and currently directs many digital projects. Together with Sharon Leon, she co-directs DoingDH, a series of digital humanities professional development institutes.
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.
