Welcome!

I am a PhD candidate in the History and Art History Department at George Mason University (GMU) interested in histories of race, gender, space, and memory in the U.S., and incorporate public history and digital humanities methods, such as oral histories and digital mapping. Currently, I am a recipient of GMU’s Office of the Provost’s Doctoral Research Fellowship and serve as Historical Consultant for both the Richmond National Battlefield Park at the National Park Service and Chimborazo Park Conservancy. Last spring, I was Instructor of Record for the course HIST 390 “The Digital Past”. For the last three years, I was a Fellow and graduate research assistant at the the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. I earned a Master’s in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in 2019 from Georgia State University, where I completed my Master’s Thesis “Buried Histories: A De-Colonial, Feminist View of Land, Space, and U.S. Universities,” which engaged university histories with women’s and gender studies and memory studies. My dissertation tentatively titled, “Forgetting the Freed,” focuses on memory, race, identity, and power through the case study of Chimborazo Park, a public and commemorative site in Richmond, Virginia. If you’d like to reach me, feel free to email me at lbranna@gmu.edu.