Rachel A. Shelden

Director, George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center

Associate Professor of History

117 Pond Lab

108 Weaver Building, University Park, PA 16802

rshelden@psu.edu

Education:

PhD, University of Virginia, 2011

MA, University of Virginia, 2006

BA, Stanford University, 2003

Biography:

Rachel Shelden is a scholar of U.S. political, constitutional, and legal history with a particular interest in how personal relationships and networks shaped the nineteenth-century across time and space. She is the author of Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), which examines how the social lives of federal politicians in Washington in the 1840s and 1850s created a political fraternity that left them unprepared for and surprised by the secession crisis that arrived during the winter of 1860-1861. Shelden argues that understanding how this political fraternity formed—and the regular rhythm of congressional politics more broadly—requires moving beyond the official spaces of the Capitol building (and the Congressional Globe) and instead looking to the unofficial political spaces in hotels and boardinghouses, at parties and dinners, and in the intimacies of Washington, D.C. Shelden is also co-editor, with Gary Gallagher, of A Political Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Political History (University of Virginia Press, 2012). She is the author of articles in a wide variety of history and law journals. Her article “Anatomy of a Presidential Campaign from the Supreme Court Bench: John McLean, Levi Woodbury, and the Election of 1848,” was the winner of the Supreme Court Historical Society’s Hughes-Gossett Award for best article published in the Journal of Supreme Court History in 2022.

Shelden’s current book project, The Political Supreme Court, examines the political activities and political culture of U.S. Supreme Court justices from the early nineteenth century to the 1890s. This project has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Virginia Historical Society, and the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. In 2022 Shelden was named an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. She has been a contributor to news outlets such as the Washington Post, The Atlantic, BBC News, Al Jazeera, NPR, and CSPAN. Shelden also serves on the Historians Council on the Constitution at the Brennan Center for Justice.

As Director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, Shelden oversees Penn State’s institute for cutting-edge scholarship on slavery, race, and democracy in the mid-nineteenth century and beyond. Among other scholarly activities, the Center runs fellowships for graduate students, postdoctoral students, and professors; offers internships for undergraduate students; and hosts the annual Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era.