I am a social historian and an Assistant Professor of U.S. and Digital History at the University of North Georgia. I’m also the creator of Death in Diorama: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a digital project about Frances Glessner Lee and her miniature crime scenes. My research and teaching focus on women & Gender, crime and punishment in U.S. history, and digital research methods. I received my PhD in history from George Mason University in May 2019. I tweet @HistoriErin.
Research
Dissertation
“Under the Guise of Protection: Sex, Race, and Eugenics in Virginia’s Reformatories for Wayward Girls, 1910-1942.” Defended, March 29, 2019.
Digital Projects
Death in Diorama: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
In the 1940s, a Chicago heiress, built the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, composite crime scene models recreated on a one-inch-to-one-foot scale. This project illuminates the Nutshells and their place in the history of forensic science. Read More…
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Executions of Women in the United States
I applied data visualization and querying techniques (including Google APIs and PHP/MySql) to data from “The Executions in the United States” database to identify patterns in state-sanctioned executions of women between 1608 and 2002. Read more…
Women on Trial: Exploring the History of American Women through Criminal Trials
I created a course using leading theories from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to teach undergraduates how to think historically about women and sensational trials. Read more…