Hi there 👋

I'm Amanda (Mandy) Regan. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Clemson University. I specialize in digital history as well as late-nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. history with a focus on women and gender. At Clemson, I teach courses in American history as well as graduate courses in the department's new Digital History Ph.D. program (@Clemson-Digital-History).

I also am the co-director of Mapping the Gay Guides (@MappingtheGayGuides), a digital mapping project that draws on Bob Damron’s Address Books, a prolific set of travel guides that became almost survival guides to gay and queer travelers across the United States in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Much like the Green Books of the 1950s and 1960s, which African Americans used to find friendly businesses that would cater to black citizens in the era of Jim Crow apartheid, Damron’s guidebooks aided a generation of queer people in identifying sites of community, pleasure, and politics. Our research team has begun turning the thousands of listings within the guides into usable, functioning data to allow researchers to make connections between historical queer communities.

In my own research, I'm working on a book manuscript entitled, Shaping Up: Physical Fitness for Women 1880-1965, which examines why the fitness of female bodies was a matter of national concern and interest throughout the twentieth century. It is under contract with the University of Virginia Press. While the book is mostly a traditional manuscript, I do have a few repositories on GitHub related to data for the book. Specifically, the Boston Gymnasiums Visualization which maps public gymnasiums in the city of Boston over time and shows the decline in attendance as a result of the 1918 Pandemic. I also have created a textual dataset generated from ocr'd copies of Mind and Body, a physical education journal from the early 20th century.

You can read more about me and my work on my website.