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Dr. Lauren Poor is the Director of Public Humanities and Arts (PHA) and an Assistant Professor of Practice at the Fitz Center for Leadership and Community at the University of Dayton. As Director of PHA, she collaborates with community partners and UD faculty to pursue extramural funding to support public humanities and arts projects. She is in consultation with faculty to develop a new Introduction to Public Humanities and Arts course to be offered at UD in the near future.

In addition to her work in the Fitz Center, Dr. Poor teaches and does history research. She is a historian of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic World, particularly interested in transnational issues, including immigration, xenophobia, religious toleration and state formation and identity. She especially enjoys teaching the history of immigration to the United States in a global context. Outside of the classroom, Dr. Poor is dedicated to supporting student access to study abroad and community engagement opportunities more broadly, locally and globally.

Dr. Poor has begun a new digital humanities research project to map the history of immigration and migration to Dayton. She also works on her current book project, Refugee Nation: The Origins of Practicing English Toleration, c. 1660-1732, which examines the late 17th and early 18th-century culture and politics of refugee relief. Through a comparative study of the English reception of Huguenot, Irish, Palatine and Salzburg refugees, she traces the development of England as a refugee nation and the subsequent utilization of the Atlantic as a corrective to England’s refugee "problem."

She is originally from Boston, and now lives with her husband and their twin six-year-old boys in the Dayton region. In her spare time, she loves hiking (especially in Scotland!), traveling and caring for her many pets.

Courses taught

• Global Migrations
• Citizenship and Community Service: Learning for the World
• US in Global Perspectives - A Nation of Immigrants
• Early Modern Witchcraft
• Britain in the Nineteenth Century
• History of the U.S, To/From 1877
• World History To/From 1500

Grants and fellowships

• Fundamentals of Data Research Fellowship, Baylor University (2019)
• W.M. Keck Foundation Fellowship, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (2014)
• NACBS-Huntington Library Fellowship, North American Conference on British Studies (2013-14)
• Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Indiana University, Research Grant (2013)
• Junior Research Fellow, History Learning Project, Indiana University (2008-09)