Lauren Brand was an AHA researcher in 2022–23 and now serves as the reviews editor at the American Historical Review. She is a historian of 19th-century United States history with an MA and PhD from Rice University and a BA from Southern Nazarene University.
Whitney E. Barringer was an AHA researcher in 2022–24 and now serves as a program and data analyst at the AHA. She earned a BA from the University of Central Arkansas and an MA and PhD from the University of Mississippi. She taught within the University of Central Arkansas’s Norbert O. Schedler Honors College and the history department for five years. Her previous research focused on state-building, institutions, and intellectual history in the 19th-century South, especially pertaining to mental institutions in Mississippi.
Nicholas Kryczka was an AHA research coordinator in 2022–24. Currently, he is a scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Nick earned a PhD in history at the University of Chicago, an MA at Northeastern Illinois University, and a BA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Nick taught high school social studies for a decade in the Chicago Public Schools and has developed K–12 history curriculum for the Newberry Library and the Chicago Collections Consortium. A historian of education and urban space, Nick is currently working on a book, under contract with the University of Chicago Press, on the history of education reform in late 20th-century Chicago.
Scot McFarlane was an AHA researcher in 2023–24. He earned a PhD in American history from Columbia University and a BA from Bowdoin College, where he is currently a research affiliate in environmental studies. As a river historian, Scot collaborates with teachers to incorporate environmental history into K–12 US history courses. He has developed a widely used website on the history of rivers and published several articles on our relationship to waterways. Scot has taught history at the collegiate and high school level, served as a research scholar for Historic New England, and founded the Oxbow History Company.