Rudolph and Louise Fishel Endowed Scholarship History and Art History

Greta is a doctoral candidate in early American history and digital history. For the past four years, Greta has served as a key collaborator on several National Endowment for the Humanities funded projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, including Mapping Early American Elections and American Religious Ecologies. She is also co-editor of Current Research in Digital History. She received her bachelor’s degree from Taylor University and her master’s degree in history from George Mason University. She was also part of the inaugural cohort of Mason’s Graduate Certificate in Digital Public Humanities.

Greta’s dissertation combines her interests in early American history and digital history through a geospatial analysis of three generations of the George Mason family during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Swain’s work explores how the Potomac River and other local waterways acted as conduits for network-building—mediating kinship, commercial and agricultural networks, and creating webs of women and enslaved people. The Fishel fellowship will allow Greta to build datasets, conduct social network analysis, and construct dynamic, geo-referenced digital maps which undergird her research.