Individual Scholar Page

Personal Info

Photo

About Me

Amanda Regan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Clemson University. She specializes in digital history as well as late-nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. history with a focus on women and gender.

Her research sits at the intersection of women’s history, fitness history, and history of the body. Additionally, her work often relies upon computational methodologies as a research tool for examining large corpuses of primary sources and gleaning new insights. Her current book, Shaping Up: Physical Fitness for Women 1880-1965, examines why the fitness of female bodies was a matter of national concern and interest throughout the twentieth century. Shaping Up traces the origins of how fitness became a tool in the repertoire of physical educators, reformers and state actors who sought to shape behavior and inscribe their values onto the female body, often in reaction to various social anxieties throughout the twentieth century. She argues that the fitness and shape of the female body became an issue of interest tailor-made for government intervention well before the modern fitness movement was born.

She is also the co-director of Mapping the Gay Guides. Mapping the Gay Guides is a digital history project that aims to understand often ignored queer geographies using the Damron Address Books, an early but longstanding travel guide aimed at gay men since the early 1960s. Similar in function to the green books used by African Americans during the Jim Crow era to help identify businesses that catered to black clients in the South, the Damron Guides aided a generation of queer people to identity sites of community, pleasure, and politics. By associating geographical coordinates with each location mentioned within the Damron Guides, MGG provides an interface for visualizing the growth of queer spaces between 1965 and 1980.

From 2013 to 2015 Amanda was a Digital History Fellow at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM). Following her fellowship, she continued at RRCHNM where she served as the Software Development Manger for the PressForward Project and as the Managing Editor of Digital Humanities Now. She has also taught in the Department of History and Art History at GMU. Specifically, she taught the department’s undergraduate digital history course which teaches students to do ask and answer historical questions using digital software.

Recent Publications

• Amanda Regan and Eric Gonzaba, “Mapping the ‘New Gay South:’ Queer Space and Southern
  Life 1965–1980,” The Southern Quarterly 58, nos. 1 and 2, Fall 2020/Winter 2021 (forthcoming).
• “Mining Mind and Body: Approaches and Considerations for Using Topic Modeling to Identify Discourses in Digitized Publications,” Journal of Sport History 44, no. 2 (Summer 2017).

Media Coverage

Social Media

@regan008

Country Focus

United States

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Computational, Gender, Sports, Women, World War II