Amanda Regan
I am a historian of the late-nineteenth and twentieth-century United States and a specialist in digital and computational history. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Clemson University and Director of Graduate Studies overseeing the History MA degree and the first of its kind Digital History Ph.D. Program.
As a digital historian, I develop methods that uncover previously invisible patterns in the historical record, combining large-scale data analysis, geospatial mapping, and algorithmic approaches with traditional archival research. I am also increasingly interested in the impact of AI on historical research and teaching, both what it makes possible and where it falls short.
My research centers on women’s and gender history in the twentieth-century United States, with particular attention to the history of the body, fitness, and health. My book, entitled Shaping Up: Women, Physical Fitness, and American Society, is forthcoming from the University of Virginia press in April 2027.
Shaping Up
Fitness for women has never been just about health and exercise. Shaping Up shows how, in the late nineteenth century, the concept of physical fitness began to function as a political category to help define who was “fit” to participate in American society. Regan traces how elite educators, reformers, and government officials inaugurated fitness programs to regulate working-class and immigrant women’s bodies, and she demonstrates how measurement and discipline remained central to fitness culture across eight decades. From anthropometric charts in the 1880s to “figure analysis” sessions in the 1960s, government-sponsored and private fitness programs continually reinforced standards of white middle-class femininity.
Publications
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Let's talk history & data
If you are a prospective student, interested in my research, want to talk about a collaboration, curious about the possabilities and limits of AI for historical work, or need someone to speak about digital history, get in touch.