Staff

Dr. Jessica Otis is an Assistant Professor of History and a director at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. After receiving both her MS in Mathematics and her PhD in History from the University of Virginia, she was a CLIR-DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in Early Modern Data Curation working on the NEH-funded Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. Subsequently, as the Digital Humanities Specialist in the University Libraries at Carnegie Mellon University, she co-founded the dSHARP digital scholarship center and the PGH|DH regional digital humanities group. Her research focuses on the cultural history of mathematics, cryptography, and plague in early modern England and her articles have appeared in the Journal of British Studies, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing.

Lincoln Mullen is the Director of RRCHNM and an associate professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. He is a historian of American religion and the nineteenth-century United States, often using computational methods for texts and maps. His recent digital publication, America’s Public Bible: A Commentary, was developed at RRCHNM. Lincoln has been a principal investigator or Co-Pi on several projects while at RRCHNM, including American Religious Ecologies, Legal Modernism, and Mapping Early American Elections. He has also authored several articles encouraging argument driven digital history, is a writer of the podcast Antisemitism, U.S.A., and is an editor for Current Research in Digital History. From 2019 to 2022 he was a fellow in the Young Scholars in American Religion program at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture.

Nate Sleeter directs current education projects at the center and serves as the point of contact for legacy education projects. A former classroom teacher, his work at RRCHNM includes helping to develop, administer, and research history education resources for K-16 students and educators. He is especially interested inquiry-based approaches that explore how historians analyze evidence. He has also worked to develop online and hybrid courses including Teaching Hidden History, Hidden in Plain Sight, and Virginia Studies. Nate has a PhD from Mason on the history of gifted children in the United States.

Stephen Robertson is best known in digital history for his work on Digital Harlem, which he created with his collaborators in the Black Metropolis project. Digital Harlem won the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History and the ABC-CLIO Online History Award of the American Library Association in 2010. He and his collaborators are currently developing the site to offer a spatial perspective on the 1935 Harlem riot. Robertson is the author of Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) and co-author of Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars (Harvard University Press, 2010). He has published articles on sex crimes, modern childhood, legal history, everyday life in 1920s Harlem, and undercover investigation in journals such as Gender and History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, and Journal of the History of Sexuality. His current research examines private detectives and the practice of undercover surveillance in the United States between 1865 and 1941. Robertson has won a number of teaching awards, including a Carrick Australian Award for University Teaching Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning in 2006 and a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award in 2008. Prior to joining RRCHNM, Robertson taught at the University of Sydney from 2000 to 2013. From 1998-1999, he was the JNG Finley Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, and he was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. He received his PhD from Rutgers University, and his undergraduate degrees from the University of Otago, in New Zealand. He blogs at http://drstephenrobertson.com/ and about Digital Harlem at http://digitalharlemblog.wordpress.com.

Matthew B. Karush is Chair of the History & Art History Department and Professor of History at George Mason University. Since 2015, he has also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Social History. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1997. An expert in modern Argentine political and cultural history, he recently published Musicians in Transit: Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music (Duke, 2017), and was a co-winner of the 2018 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award. He is the co-editor of The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth Century Argentina (Duke, 2010) and the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters. He is currently writing a cultural history of modern Argentina and is also a Principal Investigator on Hearing the Americas, a digital exploration of the early decades of the recording industry, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Michael O’Malley received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at GMU since 1994. Publications include Keeping Watch: A history of American Time (1994) and The State of Cultural History (forthcoming 2008). He is at work on a book on the history of money and value in 19th century America. As Associate Director of the Center for History and New Media he has done extensive work in digital media, including publications and presentations on web design and digital pedagogy as well as the production of video and audio for web based educational projects. An amateur musician, O’Malley is also interested in the history of recorded sound and recorded sound technology.

For almost two decades, Kelly Schrum was the Director of Educational Projects at RRCHNM. Kelly is an Associate Professor in the Higher Education Program at George Mason University, and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of History and Art History. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University and is the author of Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture, 1920-1950 (2004; paperback 2006). Other publications include U.S. History Matters: A Student Guide to History Online (co-authored, 2004; 2nd ed 2008), World History Matters: A Student Guide to History Online (co-authored, 2008) and “‘Teena Means Business’: Teenage Girls’ Culture and Seventeen Magazine, 1944-1950,” in Delinquent Daughters: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Culture. Schrum is Director of Teachinghistory.org and numerous other history education websites, including Children and Youth in History, Making the History of 1989, World History Sources and Women in World History. She is associate director of History Matters. Schrum has served as the Academic Program Director on multiple Teaching American History grants and has worked extensively in the areas of 20th-century American culture, new media, and teacher training.

I am both a digital historian and a microhistorian. My geographic field of expertise is Early Modern Italy, with an emphasis on the history of violence, social history, and the history of women and gender. As a digital historian, I focus on historical GIS, data-driven history, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL). My book Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy combines my interests, using digital methods, prosopography, and microhistory to examine the complex and intertwined relationship between the vendettas of the men and women of the governing elites and the state building they helped to effect. I am co-PI of the digital spatial history project Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy, which looks at the relation of geography to violent crime, and the impact of space on violence, with a focus on Bologna and Modena in the Emilia-Romagna and the Venetian Empire. I’m also working on several other digital history projects, and I teach classes in introductory digital history for undergraduate and graduate students, with a focus on the history of crime and violence. My article, “Menocchio Mapped: Italian Microhistory and the Digital Spatial Turn” will be out this fall.

Dr. Deepthi Murali is research assistant professor at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University. She is an art historian of South Asia. Her research examines transcultural processes of production of wood and ivory objects from southwestern India and cotton textiles from southeastern India, and their use across the broader Indian Ocean World. At RRCHNM, she is co-PI of Connecting Threads, a born-digital project tracing the production and circulation of checked cotton textiles from India and their role in constructions of fashion and identity amongst free and enslaved communities of color in the Greater Caribbean Region. Her other project Digital Chintz investigates the use of Digital Humanities (DH) methodologies in the discipline of art history through studying aggregated museum metadata on chintz textiles in North American museums. She is also the co-PI for HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium, a digital public history project from The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. As a postdoctoral fellow (2020-2022) at RRCHNM, Deepthi also worked as a producer on Consolation Prize, a history podcast from R2 Studios, Collecting These Times, and World History Commons. Deepthi’s scholarship has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Arts & Humanities Research Council, American Institute of Indian Studies, and Yale Center for British Art. Her work on career diversity for students in the Humanities was supported by Humanities Without Walls Consortium and the Mellon Foundation. Deepthi has a B.Arch in Architecture from Bangalore University, India, M.S. in Historic Preservation from The University of Texas at Austin, and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Mills Kelly is Executive Director of the Center for History and New Media and a Professor of History at George Mason University. His new media interests center on public history and the influence of digital media on student learning in history. He co-directed two NEH-funded education projects: World History Sources and Women in World History that won the American Historical Association’s James Harvey Robinson Award in 2007 for the best teaching resource of the previous two years. He was the principle investigator on another NEH-funded education project: Making the History of 1989: The Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. In recognition of his work on teaching with technology, Mills received the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award and George Mason University’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2005. In 2020 Mills received the Gutenberg Teaching Award from the University of Mainz. In 1999 he was a Pew National Fellow with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and in 2001-03 was a fellow with the Visible Knowledge Project based at Georgetown University. He is currently working on a digital history of the Appalachian Trail, America’s oldest and most famous long-distance hiking trail. From 2018-2020, Mills was part of the presidential team of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), and served as the organization’s president in 2018-2019. Mills is the author of Teaching History in the Digital Age (2013) and, Without Remorse: Czech National Socialism in Late-Habsburg Austria (2007). Mills blogs at edwired.

John Winters writes on the histories of Indigenous people and institutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that shaped aspects of colonial American culture and memory in their own image. John is the author of “The Amazing Iroquois” and the Invention of the Empire State (OUP 2023) and holds a grant with the National Park Service. He comes to GMU from Penn State, Southern Miss, and Westminster College.

Ronny Grundig is the 2025–26 Gerda Henkel Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital History at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM). He received his PhD in Modern History from the University of Potsdam with a dissertation on inheritance practices and tax policies in postwar Germany and Britain. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher and academic coordinator at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Baltic Sea Region Research (IFZO) at the University of Greifswald. His second book project examines the history of neighborhoods in 19th- and 20th-century Germany, combining social and cultural history with digital history approaches.

Alison is the Office Manager for RRCHNM, where she helps keeps things running smoothly. She has a BA in English from George Mason University.

Jason A. Heppler is a historian and senior web developer at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. He specializes in the twentieth century environmental history of the North American West and Great Plains, focusing on political, urban, and agricultural histories surrounding land use, climate, political change, and the experience of landscapes. He is the author of Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism (2024), co-editor of Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy (2020), and co-creator, technical lead, or project principal on several digital history projects. Additionally, he is an Affiliate Fellow at the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Paige Magoto is a historian of gender and sexuality, with an explicit interest in sex work and workers of the Progressive Era United States. I recently completed my Master’s Thesis titled “Race, Sex Work and Spatial Segregation in Storyville, New Orleans” which focused on sexual and racial stereotypes and how they developed a culture of segregation and racial hierarchy in the legalized vice district Storyville from 1897-1917. Storyville is an infamous vice district located next to the French Quarter of New Orleans, which attempts to perpetuate the racial “fantasy” of the Old South through sex work, brothels, bars, and music. I am also a digital historian, while working on my master’s thesis I was able to create a dataset of over 8,000 unique entries of the privately printed directories of Storyville called the Blue Books. With this dataset, I was able to explore how the dynamics between sex workers and madams within the district changed over time.

\nAlexandra Miller is a doctoral student at George Mason University. She previously studied at Truman State University (BA History) and the University of South Carolina (MA Public History). Miller researches green spaces, most recently urban parks and playgrounds in the American Progressive Era. Her primary interest is in using spatial history as an investigation method, and she has applied this methodology to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and gender. Miller has previously worked in museums and archives, including the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, the Missouri Judicial Archives, the Del and Norma Robison Planetarium, and the John Wornall and Alexander Major Historic Homes. She is most proud of organizing a rock concert, publishing her book and podcast, and making good pie.\n

\nSavannah is a PhD student at George Mason University and Graduate Research Assistant at RRCHNM. She received her undergraduate education at Bridgewater College, where she majored in history and computer science. Her research interests focus on 20th century America, women’s history, and digital history. Savannah is excited to contribute to RRCHNM’s projects.\n

Shae Corey is a PhD student in History at George Mason University and a Graduate Research Assistant at RRCHNM. Shae’s research primarily focuses on religious activism’s impact on the development of DC neighborhoods in the twentieth century. She is broadly interested in Religious History, Women’s History, and Urban History.

Laura is a graduate research assistant and a fourth year PhD candidate in the History Department at George Mason. She is currently a project coordinator and Omeka S trainer for the HBCU History Culture and Access Consortium project with the Smithsonian’s Office of Strategic Partnerships. She received a Master’s in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Georgia State University

Brandon Tachco is the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) Research Partner Fellow at George Mason University. His projects support Korean War efforts and other initiatives. Brandon has a BA in history from UCLA and a PhD in world history from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He has an interdisciplinary professional background, having worked in academic publishing, experiential education, non-profit, and public history. As the Managing Editor for the Journal of World History, he helped design and implement its first online manuscript submission and peer review system. Before joining the RRCHNM, Brandon spent nearly five years working on and around historic ships at the San Francisco Maritime Museum, especially in connection with their “living” history education programs. As their Communications Manager, he also ran their website (maritime.org), social media, digital newsletters, and biannual membership history publication, The Sea Letter. Brandon’s personal research centers on global and comparative history with special focus on maritime connections between Europe, the United States, the Pacific, and South and Southeast Asia. His current book project looks at shipping and shipbuilding at the turn of the 20th century. Through the lens of ships and shipbuilding materials he analyzes the many transnational connections these topics represent, including a seemingly isolate shipbuilding culture and society in Glasgow to complex geo-political developments and business imperial expansion in South and Southeast Asia.

Annabelle Spencer is a PhD student in History, specializing in Women & Gender History and Digital Humanities. She is a Graduate Research Assistant at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) and an affiliate for the Center for Mason Legacies (CML). She received her BA in History from Austin Peay State University and MA in History‬ from George Mason University. At RRCHNM, she has worked on the Smithsonian HBCU History, Culture, and Access Consortium (HCAC) Project and R2 Studios’ podcasts Worlds Turned Upside Down and Your Most Obedient and Humble Servant. Currently, she is supporting the center’s digital pedagogy initiatives.

Timmia King is a Ph.D. canidate in the History department and a Graduate Research Assistant at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. She is currently working on a project called the HBCU History & Culture Access Consortium. Timmia received her bachelor’s degree in African American Studies from Howard University, and a dual master degree in African American and African Diaspora Studies and Library Sciences from Indiana University. Her research interests include African American memory work, specifically their self-documenting practices and generally 20th century military history of Africans apart of the diaspora and on the continent.

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.

Dan is a PhD student and a 2019-2021 Digital History Fellow at CHNM. He researches race, gender, and disability in early America. He earned his undergraduate degree in History and Political Science at The George Washington University in 2017 and a Master’s in History at George Mason in 2019.

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.

Greta Swain is a Ph.D. Candidate and a Graduate Research Assistant at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. She was a Digital History Fellow at RRCHNM from 2017-2018. She is currently the Project Manager for the American Religious Ecologies project. Greta received her bachelor’s degree in history from Taylor University, and both a graduate certificate in Digital Public Humanities and a master’s degree in history from George Mason University. Greta’s dissertation combines her interests in early American history and digital history through a geospatial analysis of three generations of the George Mason family during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Roy Rosenzweig was Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University, where he also headed the Center for History and New Media (CHNM). He co-authored with Elizabeth Blackmar The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, which won several awards including the 1993 Historic Preservation Book Award and the 1993 Urban History Association Prize for Best Book on North American Urban History. He also co-authored (with David Thelen) The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, which has won prizes from the Center for Historic Preservation and the American Association for State and Local History. He was co-author of the CD-ROM, Who Built America?, which won James Harvey Robinson Prize of American Historical Association for its “outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history.” His other books include Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 and edited volumes on history museums (History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment), history and the public (Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public), history teaching (Experiments in History Teaching), oral history (Government and the Arts in 1930s America), and recent history (A Companion to Post-1945 America). His most recent book (co-authored with Daniel Cohen) was Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has lectured in Australia as a Fulbright Professor. He recently served as Vice-President for Research of the American Historical Association. As founder and director of CHNM, he was involved in a number of different digital history projects including websites on U.S. history, historical thinking, the French Revolution, the history of science and technology, world history, and the September 11, 2001 attacks. All of these are available through the CHNM website. His work in digital history was recognized in 2003 with the Richard W. Lyman Award (awarded by the National Humanities Center and the Rockefeller Foundation) for “outstanding achievement in the use of information technology to advance scholarship and teaching in the humanities.” Roy’s vita is available here.