Rachel Shelden is a historian of politics, constitutionalism, and law, with a particular focus on personal relationships and networks in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is an associate professor of history at Penn State University and the Director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center. She teaches courses on the Civil War era, constitutional history, the history of U.S. slavery, and the memory and culture of the mid-nineteenth century.
As director of the Richards Center, Shelden oversees several prestigious fellowship programs for graduate students, junior faculty, and mid-career scholars. The Center is also the institutional home of the Journal of the Civil War Era.
She serves as a member of the Brennan Center’s Historians’ Council on the Constitution and on a variety of editorial boards, including the Journal of American History, Journal of American Constitutional History, and the Journal of Supreme Court History. She is also an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.
A Chicago native and serious baseball fan, she is a graduate of Stanford University (BA) and the University of Virginia (MA & PhD). Before joining the faculty at Penn State, she was an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma and an affiliated faculty member at the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at OU.
She lives in State College, Pennsylvania with her husband and two kids.
