Jen Andrella is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Michigan State University. She is a digital humanist with an emphasis on the nineteenth-century American West, Native American ethnohistory, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. Her dissertation, “When the War Raged On: Montana Territory, the Politics of Authority, and National Reconstruction, 1860-1900,” examines the process of Recnstruction from the historical vantage point of the Northernwestern Great Plains. Through an analysis of cartography, personal and mass communication, artwork, literature, and government records, the work explores how Reconstruction was a national spatial transformation that experimented with local and federal authority, settler colonialism, and state formation in the West.
At Michigan State, Jen served five years as an assistant in the Lab for the Education and Advancement of Digital Research (LEADR) where she developed digital project lesson plans on narrative mapping, data mapping, content management systems, and data visualizations. From 2019-2020, she was a member on the faculty advisory board for Michigan State library’s Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) and was a selected fellow for the Cultural Heritage Informatics (CHI) initiative. She is currently pursuing the graduate certificate in digital humanities in addition to her Ph.D.
For more information about Jen Andrella and her work, please visit www.jenniferandrella.com. To contact, please email: andrella@msu.edu
Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg–Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.