DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  American History, Before 1900; American History, Since 1900

Thematic Field(s):  Colonial, Imperial, & Diasporic History; Gender and Sexuality History

Principal Research Interest(s):  U.S. empire, race, gender, visual culture, tourism

Biography

Emily Lyon is a Chabraja Center for Historical Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Service, working at the Newberry Library's Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography during the 2024-2025 academic year. She is a historian of race, gender, visual culture, and U.S. empire in the early twentieth century and her dissertation examined how white women, working as photographers, cartographers, travel writers, and monument makers, produced visual commodities would encourage Americans, and especially white women, to travel to and experience sites of empire as tourists. She received her PhD from Northwestern University in 2024. She is invested in bringing her research and expertise as a historian to wider audiences, and her current work at the Newberry centers on researching and writing, planning public programming, and producing digital content for the "Mapping Outside the Lines" exhibit, which will be on display from September 2025 through January 2026.