Talk: “Camera, laptop, and what else?: Hacking Better Tools for the Short Archival Research Trip”
Panel: How-To Digital Humanities

Shane Landrum is a Ph.D. candidate in American history and a Mellon Dissertation Year Fellow at Brandeis University. His historical interests include law, women and gender, sexuality, public health, and technology. After receiving a BA from Smith College in computer science and American studies, he worked for 6 years as a web software engineer in private industry. His experience with digital tools and open-source software shaped his work as a historian, and he’s recently become interested in how digital methods modify traditional research strategies for women’s history and African-American history. He has received research awards and fellowships from numerous sources, including the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Institute for Political History, and the Lemelson Center of the Smithsonian Institution. He maintains a professional website at http://cliotropic.org.

Shane’s dissertation uncovers the history of birth certificates and compulsory birth registration in the United States, 1840-present. It examines how Americans developed new bureaucracies of identity, how ordinary people used birth certificates to claim the benefits of citizenship, and how native-born Americans came to take birth certificates for granted as a fact of modern life. By combining material-culture approaches with political, legal, and social history, his research demonstrates how the birth certificate- the fundamental document of birthright citizenship- both reflected and created modern American notions of race, sex, family, and indigeneity.