Karen Sieber

Karen Sieber is a historian of late nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. history, specializing in urban history, popular culture, the civil rights movement, and the public and digital humanities. She is the creator of Visualizing the Red Summer, a digital archive and data visualizations about the Red Summer race riots of 1919, which is now the most used classroom resource on the topic, with classrooms using it on five continents. She currently works as a Humanities Officer at Minnesota Humanities Center, and was previously the Humanities Specialist for the McGillicuddy Humanities Center at the University of Maine.

As a public historian, she has been involved with dozens of projects nationwide, from museum exhibits and community archives to PBS programs and oral history initiatives. Her work includes the Museum of Durham History exhibit "H is For Hayti," and the site Digital Loray, which documents life in a southern cotton mill village. Digital Loray was named a Humanities For All winner by the National Humanities Alliance. The archive and visualizations she built on the Red Summer of 1919 have been featured by sites including the National Archives, American Historical Association, Zinn Education Project, History Channel, and National Association of Public History. Her published work includes pieces for Smithsonian, Jacobin, Labor and Working Class History Association, Oral History Review, The Conversation, and a chapter in "Interpreting Labor and Working Class History at Museums and Historic Sites" (University of Illinois Press, 2022).

Links to her work and publications can be found at ksieber.com.