I have always had a passion for interacting with, learning from, and helping other people different from myself. My interest in understanding diverse human experiences drove me to be a History major in college and to then pursue my Master's in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. During my Master's, I learned that the WGSS discipline is more than studying women, sexuality, race, or even other identities like class and dis/ability. Most significantly, the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies field informed my analyses of power and place, which I began to use as a critical lens to view history and modern-day racial issues in the U.S. My experiences living in both Atlanta, Georgia and Greenville, South Carolina also considerably shaped my views on how space and place interact with historical remembrances, especially in terms of race, class, gender, and Southern identity.
This website serves as the digitization of my Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Master's Thesis "Buried Histories: A De-Colonial, Feminist View of Land, Space, and U.S. Universities." It only represents a small component of my overall MA work and research, so reach out to me at lbranna@masonlive.gmu.edu if you have more questions about this project!
My Master's thesis serves as an entry point into how I think about concepts such as public history, collective memory, commemoration, and digital collections of place. What does the history of producing spaces and nations do to our current perception of citizenship and national identity? What does methodologically mapping out or publicly memorializing certain spaces do to our understandings of U.S. history? These are questions and ideas that I am pursuing in my studies at George Mason University as a History PhD student. Specifically, I am interested in continuing to research the intersections of slavery, settler colonialism, and whiteness as well as how identities of race, gender, and class shaped interactions between people living in the U.S. during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.