Amy Nelson

Amy Nelson is Associate Professor of History and the Innovation Catalyst Group Faculty Fellow in Technology, Learning and Online Systems (TLOS). Since joining the Virginia Tech community in 1992 she has developed and taught nine new courses at the graduate and undergraduate level. She is the past recipient of the Alumni Teaching Award, the Carroll B. Shannon Excellence in Teaching Award, Two Certificates of Teaching Excellence, an Innovation Grant from CIL and the Excalibur Team Award for Teaching with Technology. Her project, Networked Learning Communities in Hybrid Courses, uses a syndicated blog as a gateway to a hybrid course in which students author original research posts on topics of their choosing, using print materials, sources available on the open web, and databases provided by the Virginia Tech Library. It uses active co-learning strategies to expand and extend the reach of the course beyond the physical confines of the classroom and the conceptual constraints of traditional writing assignments. By engaging students directly and immediately in the research process and the production of knowledge this format empowers students to "make" rather than "take" a course. Her development of networked learning environments was inspired by Gardner Campbell's New Media Seminar, which she first participated in, and then lead from 2013 to 2015. As the TLOS Faculty Fellow she works with graduate students from across the university as the instructor for Grad 5114: Contemporary Pedagogy. She has served as a co-PI on three digital history projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Nelson's current research works at the nexus of animal studies, environmental history and cultural history and focuses on the cultural implications of domestication and the significance of domestication to the history of the Eurasian plain. A specialist in Russian and Soviet culture, she is the author of an award winning study of musicians in the early Soviet period, editor of Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History (2010), and is completing a collective biography of the Soviet Space Dogs. Nelson earned a Bachelor of Arts in History and Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance from UC Santa Barbara (1983), and a PhD in Russian History from the University of Michigan in 1993.