Sarah McLennan

Department of History and Philosophy
Sarah McLennan
Assistant Professor
Department of History and Philosophy
Test | Virginia State University

Curriculum Vitae

Education

  • Ph.D., American History, College of William and Mary, 2015
  • M.A., American History, College of William and Mary
  • B.A., History and English, Michigan State University

Research and Teaching Interest

  • 20th Century United States History: Cultural History, Public History, & History of Technology; World History

Representative Scholarly Activity

  • Co-Project Director, Dangerous Harbor: Finding Escaped Unfree Laborers in the 17th Century Chesapeake, NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant, 2023-2024
    https://dangerousharbor.vt.domains/
    • The planning phase of a collaborative project between Virginia Tech & Virginia State University that aims to make accessible seventeenth-century county court accounts of escape attempts of the Chesapeake Bay's unfree people through digitization, guiding documents, transcriptions, a database, and a plan for expansion and broad, long-term accessibility and outreach.
  • Dangerous Harbor: Collaborative and Student-Centered Primary Research and Digital Preservation, Digital Archives in the Commonwealth Annual Meeting, Richmond, VA, November 2024
  • Memory and Public History in the United States (Invited Speaker via Zoom), Department of North American Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, November 2024
  • Panelist, Dangerous Harbor: Finding Escaped Unfree Laborers in the 17th Century Chesapeake project webinar (via Zoom), Virginia Tech History Department, Blacksburg, VA, August 12, 2024
  • Guest Lecture for History on Film: Hidden Figures, Civil Rights, and the 1960s Space Race (via Zoom), SUNY-Suffolk County Community College, Selden, New York, December 2023
  • Guest Lecture for Science on Screen series: Hidden Figures: When the Computer Wore A Skirt – Women in Computing and Space, Byrd Theater, Richmond, VA, May 17, 2022
  • Review of Selling the Sights: The Invention of the Tourist in American Culture, by Will B. Mackintosh for Journal of Arizona History, Fall 2019
  • Review of Selling the Sights: The Invention of the Tourist in American Culture, by Will B. Mackintosh for Journal of Arizona History (forthcoming)
  • Gender and Programming, “My Mother Was a Computer”: Legacies of Gender and Technology Digital Humanities Symposium, College of William & Mary, November 2018
  • Women in Computing: Building Careers, Innovating Technologies, Challenging Misogyny (Panel Commentator), Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Hofstra University, June 2017
  • Computing and the Color Line: Race, Gender, and Opportunity in Early Computing at NASA, Society for the History of Technology Conference, Albuqurque, NM, October 2015
  • “I was a Computer when the Computer Wore a Skirt”: Gender, Cold War Science, and Human Computing, Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Toronto, Canada, May 2014
  • The Duty of Every Tourist in San Francisco”: Urban Encounters in San Francisco’s “Chinatown Tours”, 19 th Century Studies Association Conference, Chicago, IL, March 2014
  • Speaking of the Past: Oral Histories of African Americans at William & Mary, Lemon Project Spring Symposium, Williamsburg, VA, April 2013
  • Review of Women in Space: 23 Stories of First Flights, Scientific Missions, and Gravity-Breaking Adventures by Karen Bush Gibson for Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society, 2017
  • “A History of Women and Computing,” A Different Point of View, National Women’s History Museum Quarterly Magazine, Winter 2016
  • “’When the Computer Wore a Skirt’: Langley’s Human Computers, 1935-1970” for the NASA Langley Cultural Resources Database, 2011
  • “Jamestown 350 th Anniversary, 1957” in Encyclopedia Virginia, Editor: Matthew Gibson, 2008

Honors, Awards and Grants

  • Virginia State University Excellence in Online Teaching Award, 2017
  • Joan Cahalin Robinson Prize, Society for the History of Technology, 2015
  • Women in Technological History Conference Travel Grant, 2015
  • Provost Dissertation Completion Fellowship, College of William & Mary, 2014-2015
  • The Lemon Project Graduate Fellowship, College of William & Mary, 2012-2013
  • Phi Beta Kappa