Professor Laurel Shire is a social and cultural historian whose research focuses on the United States in the nineteenth century, especially the relationship between race, gender, and U.S. expansion. Shire is Professor in the Department of History, joint appointed with the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, and the Co-Director of the Program in American Studies and the Digital Humanities Lab at Western University. Her research connects scholarship on North American borderlands, Western and Southern U.S. history, the Atlantic world, Native and African American studies, and women’s and gender history.