Amanda Regan
I am a historian of the late-nineteenth and twentieth-century United States and a specialist in digital and computational history. Currently, I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Clemson University, where I also serve as Director of Graduate Studies overseeing both the History MA degree and the first of its kind Digital History Ph.D. Program.
I earned my Ph.D. from George Mason University in 2019. From 2013 to 2015 I held a Digital History Fellowship at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), where I subsequently managed software development for the PressForward Project and was the managing editor of Digital Humanities Now. Before joining Clemson, I was a Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History.
As a digital and computational historian, I develop methods that uncover previously invisible patterns in the historical record, combining large-scale data analysis, geospatial mapping, and algorithmic approaches with traditional archival research to advance our understanding of American history.
My first book, Shaping Up: Women, Physical Fitness, and American Society (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming April 2027), traces how fitness became a mechanism for measuring and regulating women’s bodies across nearly a century. Beginning with the eugenic-influenced definitions that emerged in the late nineteenth century, the book shows how fitness was never really about health or strength, but served as an evolving standard for policing who counted as “fit” to participate in American life.
I am also the co-director and lead digital historian of Mapping the Gay Guides, an NEH-funded project that transforms Bob Damron’s Address Books into an interactive dataset of nearly 200,000 LGBTQ spaces between 1965 and 2003. By mapping queer life far beyond the coastal cities where LGBTQ history is usually located, the project reveals robust networks across the United States.
Alongside my research, I teach the graduate digital methods sequence that anchors Clemson’s Digital History PhD. My courses train students to treat primary sources as data and to think computationally as a core historical skill. Increasingly, part of that work means thinking critically about what artificial intelligence makes possible for historical research and teaching as well as its limits, biases, and failings. I serve on Clemson University’s AI Council and I am currently co-editing a special issue on “AI and History” for the Journal of Digital History. I am also the Co-Vice President/President Elect of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the professional organization for Digital Humanities in the United States.
You can explore my digital projects online or view my code on GitHub. Please feel free to contact me at aeregan@clemson.edu.