Carla Gerona

 I am a historian working at Georgia Tech, and I created this “webspace” as a place to share my work and to experiment with new ways of doing history using pictures and words.  My specialty areas include early America, the Texas borderlands, and the Atlantic World.  I write and teach about these topics and have received several distinguished prizes, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship.  My first book, Night Journeys, explored the significance of Quaker dreaming.  Since then my primary field of study has shifted west to Texas.  I have written multiple articles about the different people who lived in the East Texas pineywoods, and I am completing a larger book project called, “More than Six Flags.”  Always attentive to visual elements, my Texas research has increasingly addressed how we image history, whether as paintings or data visualizations.  My interest in this approach grew while teaching Introduction to Museum Studies, a class in which students curate their own historical exhibits.  Doing history by intentionally drawing on both pictures and words seems especially relevant today as we navigate increasingly digital worlds.  I hope you enjoy this site! I have also added a link to “Southern Trails,” a portal for GT students to present digital history projects that they have completed in my classes.

More about this site:

My hope is that as I jump into building digital spaces this time, I can be more creative- and experiment with new paths for doing history, teaching history, and displaying the past. In Digital History, Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzwieg wrote that “new technologies have challenged historians to rethink the ways that they research, write, present, and teach about the past.”  For many years, I have adopted such new technologies in my classrooms and research.  My goal here is to construct this webspace so that I can continue a journey that I have taken mostly in my classrooms and research and share my ideas in a more public space.

Like most department faculty sites, this website also has some more traditional components.  For example, you can locate information about my classes and research, including teaching tools, publication links, and biographic materials.  I may add news and blog posts in the future.  But most of all, I envision this site as a digital worksite, where I can share ideas from my classrooms and my research, and develop new ideas– wherever they may go.

I would like to give special thanks to Georgia Tech, particularly the Provost Teaching and Learning Fellowship community, my colleagues in the School of History and Sociology, and all my students, including my former student, Hayden Gregg, who went on to Graduate School in museum studies and helped me design the initial framework for this website.  (Atlanta, August 2019)