About
I am a digital public historian and a program officer. I am the former Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media where I also worked as a Research Associate Professor in History and Art History at George Mason University.
My long form publication,
Stamping American Memory: Collectors, Citizens, and the Post, is available as an open access digital and print monograph from the
University of Michigan’s Digital Culture Books series (2018). It offers the first cultural history of stamp collecting through closely examining the Post Office’s commemorative stamp program. Designed to be saved as souvenirs, commemoratives circulated widely and stood as miniature memorials to carefully selected snapshots from the American past that also served the political needs of small interest groups.
I began my career working in public museums, and served as the Director of Education and Public Programs at the U.S. Navy Museum in Washington, DC for seven years before I came to RRCHNM in 2005. At the Center, I directed and managed 30+ projects. The first project that I managed and worked on from start to finish was the
Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. After HDMB, I became part of the original
Omeka team (2007-present), and continued to work on many other digital humanities and cultural heritage projects. In collaboration with colleagues at RRCHNM, I wrote many successful grant applications to public agencies (NEH, IMLS, and NSF) and private foundations (Mellon, Getty, Sloan, and Kress) that funded our work, and was an ACLS Digital Extension Fellow.
My dissertation, “Stamping American Memory: Stamp Collecting in the U.S. 1880s-1930s,” earned the Moroney Prize for Scholarship in Postal History. I was awarded the University of Michigan Press-HASTAC Prize for Digital Humanities to write and publish,
Stamping American Memory, as an open peer-reviewed, open access digital publication.
I write and present on topics in digital humanities, public history, memorials and memorialization, museums and technology, and collecting practices. I am an experienced teacher and leader of digital humanities workshops designed for scholars, GLAM professionals, and graduate students.
