Scanlan, Sophia

Sophia Scanlan (she/her) is a PhD student in United States history. She studies the intersection of race, gender, and culture in the twentieth century, particularly focusing on Black women’s history and sports. She is interested in using sports as a vehicle for understanding broader questions, such as how Black women created spaces for themselves amid racial and gender segregation and how they navigated homosocial male industries in the mid-twentieth century. 

Sophia holds a B.A. in History from Northwestern University, where her research on Black women baseball players in the Negro Leagues won an honorable mention for the best thesis in the department. As an undergraduate, she also presented her research at the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, an academic conference at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. After college, Sophia spent two years teaching middle school English and History while earning her M.S.Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. In addition to teaching, she also coached middle school cross country and varsity track.