This post is part of the Meet the ETCL Team series, which introduces the wonderful people who work in the lab and who have worked with us in the past.
Amanda is the Honorary Resident Wikipedian for 2023-24. She is an Assistant professor of History in the Department of History and Director of Geospatial History with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University, Virginia. Before joining George Mason, she held a number of 
roles at Georgia Institute of Technology including both Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the School of Media, Communication, and Literature and Research Scientist for the Center for 21st Century Universities. She currently lives in Manassas Park, Virginia with her partner and three cats named after fantasy characters–Luthien Tinuviel, Maia-Serrelinda, and Zen-Kurel.
As part of her residency, Amanda presented an online talk entitled “Can a University Education Be Open Source? Wikiversity, Open Educational Resources, and the Future of the University” on November 9th 2023. She will also provide an institute lecture at the 2024 Digital Humanities Summer Institute. Amanda’s areas of DH research interest include SOTL, open access, humanities data, video games, and digital spatial methods. She once taught an entire class centered on the popular video game Assassin’s Creed II. By integrating digital methods with historical scholarship, she still considers herself an Italian microhistorian. Her book, Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy (forthcoming, Cornell University Press) was inspired by one of Ian Gregory’s DHSI GIS workshops as was her collaborative digital spatial project, Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy, 1500-1750. She is collaborating on several other DH projects including as co-director of the la Sfera project, a digital edition of the idiosyncratic and fascinating fifteenth-century geographic text written by a Florentine merchant.
In her free time, Amanda reads a lot of fantasy, runs, rock climbs, and watches science fiction. Part of her five-year plan is to master gluten-free bread-making. When she is really stressed, she enjoys taking Skyrim vacations and just farming for a few hours. She is a local co-organizer of DH2024 and hopes digital humanities enthusiasts will join her in Arlington, Virginia in August—she promises to take the participants to the best gluten-free bakery. She will be in residence in one of her favorite places in the world in Fall of 2024–the Venetian State archives–where she will be working on her next book and taking pictures of both early modern criminal records and Venetian cats.