About Us

SHEAR is delighted to welcome Amanda Gibson as the new SHEAR Civics Exchange Outreach Coordinator!

Amanda is finishing up a postdoc at UVA and writing a book on Black informal credit markets in the antebellum South.  She received her Ph.D. from William and Mary in 2021 with the thesis “‘Credit is Due’: African Americans as Borrowers and Lenders in Antebellum Virginia.”  Amanda has published her scholarship in the Journal of Southern History and The Encyclopedia of Virgina.  

Before returning to graduate school to earn her Ph.D., Amanda served as Outreach Coordinator at the Richmond, Virginia Federal Reserve Bank.  At the Richmond Fed, among other duties, Amanda developed educational content (web and print) for the public. She served on the team that developed the Fed’s public exhibit space and hosted events and initiatives in partnership with the Fed’s educational and commercial bank partners. During her tenure at the Fed, Amanda was promoted to Outreach Coordinator and coordinated the activities of the outreach team across five states. Amanda also supervised and managed communication on behalf of Fed executives with the Fed’s advisory committees and worked closely with top executives to design a departmental unit to manage and coordinate the Fed’s key nonprofit partnerships.

Amanda believes deeply in the power of civic education to strengthen democracy and looks forward to connecting the public with SHEAR historians.  In the coming months you will be hearing a lot from Amanda!  We urge you to take her calls and follow up on her emails as she works with her fellow SHEAR members to make SHEAR Civics Exchange an essential intervention in our national discussion and public life.

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