Sheila Brennan

Sheila Brennan: Sheila is the Associate Director of Public Projects division and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Art History. She completed her Ph.D. in U.S. history at Mason in 2009. She earned her Bachelor's degree from Bates College and Master's from the University of Notre Dame in American Studies. Prior to coming to CHNM in 2005, she worked as the Director of Education and Public Programs at the U.S. Navy Museum in Washington, DC for seven years. Her research interests include public history, digital history, museums and material culture, popular collecting practices in the U.S., and late-19th and early-20th-century cultural history. She co-authored Mobile for Museums (http://chnm.gmu.edu/labs/mobile-for-museums/), a digital white paper that combines research on mobile usage in museums with development recommendations and mobile prototypes. She currently is the end user coordinator for Omeka, and has managed many digital projects, including the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank and Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives projects. She has co-authored a guide and website to help researchers make better use of technology in the archive, Taking a Byte Out of the Archives and an article on doing oral history in the digital age. She blogs at: Lot 49.