History professor Margo Shea awarded competitive Mellon fellowship

Salem resident Margo Shea, an assistant professor in Salem State University’s history department, was recently awarded a two-year Mellon post-doctoral fellowship at the Collaborative of Southern Appalachian and Place-Based Studies, a collaboration between Tennessee’s University of the South (Sewanee) and Yale University. Among a strong candidate pool, Professor Shea was chosen for “the quality of both your graduate work and your work in the past several years at Salem State, as well as the breadth and depth of your engagement with place and public scholarship,” according to the selection committee.

Professor Shea’s primary research interests are public history, Irish history and oral history and memory. Her two-year fellowship, says Shea, will provide her the “opportunity to integrate my public history research and teaching around local, community-based questions, strengths and challenges. Much like Northern Ireland, where I've worked primarily to date, Appalachia has always been about remembering.” Shea’s work in the South will focus directly on how community memory can be a catalyst for social change. She expects it will also be a case study in how academic institutions can leverage resources to support locally-generated, collaborative solutions to pressing problems.