Amanda Regan

Amanda Regan is a historian of the late-nineteenth and twentieth-centuries and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Clemson University. She earned her PhD in History from George Mason University in 2019.

Her research sits at the intersection of women’s history, fitness history, and history of the body and her work often relies upon computational methodologies as a research tool for examining large corpuses of primary sources and gleaning new insights. Her current book, Shaping Up: Physical Fitness for Women 1880-1965, examines why the fitness of female bodies was a matter of national concern and interest throughout the twentieth century. Shaping Up traces the origins of how fitness became a tool in the repertoire of physical educators, reformers and state actors who sought to shape behavior and inscribe their values onto the female body, often in reaction to various social anxieties throughout the twentieth century. It argues that the fitness and shape of the female body became an issue of interest tailor-made for government intervention well before the modern fitness movement was born.

From 2013 to 2015 Amanda was a Digital History Fellow at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM). Following her fellowship, she continued at RRCHNM where she served as the Software Development Manager for the PressForward Project and as the Managing Editor of Digital Humanities Now.