Participant Info

First Name
Samantha
Last Name
Smith
Country
United States
State
MI Michigan
Affiliation
Michigan State University
Website URL
https://history.msu.edu/people/graduate-students/samantha-smith/
Keywords
Gender and sexuality, LGBTQ, material and visual culture, urban history, working-class history, libraries and archives, public history, Chicago, Las Vegas
Availability
1
Additional Contact Information
PhD
other credentials

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Samantha “Sam” Smith (she/they) is a PhD student in History at Michigan State University.

Smith is committed to histories of gender and sexuality, especially those that involve critical visual analysis and non-textual sources. She works as a research assistant for Dr. Sharon Leon on the Mellon funded “On These Grounds” project, a digital initiative focused on describing the history of enslavement within archival collections at colleges and universities.

Prior to beginning her PhD studies, they worked as a project archivist for over four years at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois.

Smith is a queer, neurodiverse, first-gen PhD student, which for her means that they are the first one in their family to obtain a PhD. She grew up on the sacred and ancestral lands of the Menominee and Ho-Chunk Nations in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in the Lake Winnebago Region. They received their B.A. in Gender Studies (with minors in English and History) from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin in 2012, M.A. in Public History from Loyola University Chicago in 2014, and M.L.I.S. (with a certificate in Archival and Cultural Heritage Resources and Services) from Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois in 2016.

Recent Publications
Media Coverage
Country Focus
Expertise by Geography
United States
Expertise by Chronology
19th century, 20th century, 21st century
Expertise by Topic
American Civil War, Disability, Gender, Labor, Libraries & Archives, Material Culture, Migration & Immigration, Public History, Sexuality, Sexual Violence, Urban History, Women