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About Me

I started my U.S. History Ph.D. at Harvard in Autumn 2023, after earning my B.A. in History, American Studies, and Memory (2022) and my M.A. in U.S. History (2023) from the University of South Carolina, Columbia. 

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I am interested in women’s history, memory, trauma, archival power, material culture, and state-building in the nineteenth-century United States, especially as these themes relate to military women and Revolutionary War widow pensions.

My undergraduate research recenters Continental Army women as essential workers and labor agitators. It considers how the women used social networks to support and subvert military order, how they leveraged these networks (and the pension application process) to shape local memory of the war, and how early nineteenth-century literature changed the women’s place in historical memory. My M.A. thesis examines how Revolutionary War widows deployed family archives as partisan tools to claim pensions. In it, I focus on how widow pension applicants excited broader nineteenth-century debates over tariffs, federal fiscal apparatuses, and executive powers. I am currently studying how widows used dense social networks and material culture—especially family records and needlepoint samplers—to redefine the archive(s). I am also interested in the intersection of women’s history and (dis)ability history. I am beginning to study how widow pension applicants used their physical bodies as evidence of financial need and, in the process, shaped early nineteenth-century definitions of (dis)ability and productivity.

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I am also deeply passionate about teaching and public history, especially documentary editing. I served as an archival intern at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, curated exhibits for the Clay County (Missouri) Historical Society and Museum, and worked as an assistant for the Pinckney Papers Project. Now, I am an assistant editor of the Salus Populi Pension Project, a digital editing and restorative justice project that aims to transcribe, contextualize, and visualize Missouri United States Colored Troops (USCT) pension files. 

Recent Publications

Media Coverage

Social Media

twitter.com/rkjsutherland

Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

18th century, 19th century

Expertise by Topic

American Revolution, American Founding Era, Family, Gender, Government, Libraries & Archives, Material Culture, Military, Public History, Women