Georgia Highlands College
Shannon Bontrager
Bio
I live and work in Georgia but I am a transplant from Michigan. I lived in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and taught at the New English School in Amman. This year-long experience not only sharpened my interests in history but also helped me re-evaluate the way media and culture shape the world in which we live. I am interested in the Tuning of history courses and thinking about ways that U.S. Military history and World History interact. I served on the 2016 AHA Program Committee for the AHA annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, and I was an institute member of the AHA-NEH Bridging Cultures program that incorporated the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds into the U.S. History Survey. I am serving on the American Historical Association Governing Council as a Councilor for the Teaching Division for a three-year term beginning in January 2020. I like introducing my children to popular culture, watching them play sports, playing disc golf, and (someday getting back to the actual game of golf which I miss). I like traveling and watching the Detroit Tigers and Liverpool FC.
Education
I defended my doctoral dissertation in history in 2011 at Georgia State University in Atlanta on the commemoration of the military dead from the Civil War to the First World War. Before that I completed my Masters's degree in history at Central Michigan University, in Mt. Pleasant.
Employment
I am a Professor of History at Georgia Highlands College in Cartersville specializing in Military History, U.S. History, and World History. I am currently a Fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies for 2020-2021 for research on my second book currently titled "The Affinity of War: Traveling Memory, the War Dead, and the American Empire in France." I held a a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the New York University - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique "Memory and Memorialization: Representing Trauma and War," Paris, France.