Stacey Crystal LeClair

Education
Ph.D., History, University of Virginia, expected 2027
M.A., History, University of Virginia, 2023
M.A., History, University of Calgary, 2020
B.A. (with Distinction), History, University of Calgary, 2016

Biography
I am a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate and first-generation college student, originally from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. My academic career began with the study of Elizabethan England, where debates over sovereignty, jurisdiction, and property drew me toward the history of law. After two years of professional experience in the legal sector in Canada, I became invested in how legal institutions operate and how legal frameworks organize power in practice. Before coming to Virginia, I completed an M.A. in History at the University of Calgary, specializing in English legal history, with a thesis examining the centralization of local government in early modern England. I later earned an M.A. in History at the University of Virginia, focused on legal jurisdiction and Indigenous land claims in seventeenth-century Virginia.

My research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the premier federal funding body for humanities and social sciences research, and I am a three-time recipient of its nationally competitive awards.

Research
My dissertation, Drainage, Jurisdiction, and Identity from the Fens to the Chesapeake, 1580–1650, treats England’s Fenlands and colonial Virginia as parts of a single legal and environmental history. Drawing on records of the Commissions of Sewers, Virginia Company charters, legal records, and maps, I examine how early modern ideas of “improvement” reshaped relationships among land, water, property, and political authority on both sides of the Atlantic. By tracing the overlapping networks of officials, investors, landowners, and promoters involved in both fen drainage and colonial enterprise, I show that processes often treated separately as English state formation and American colonization developed within the same political and legal world. Across both landscapes, improvement became a means of asserting jurisdiction over land and the people who belonged to it, transforming environments while redefining whose claims, customs, and forms of belonging English law would recognize.

Alongside my dissertation, I am the lead curator of Taming Waters, Transforming Worlds: Law, Land, & Belonging in Seventeenth-Century England & Virginia, a major exhibition opening at UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library in October 2026 and the first exhibition led by a graduate student in the Department of History. Drawing directly from my dissertation research, the exhibition brings together seventeenth-century legal documents, maps, rare books, archaeological materials, and English and Indigenous material culture to explore how the transformation of land and water reshaped jurisdiction, sovereignty, and belonging. Developed in close partnership with the Pamunkey Indian Museum & Cultural Center, the exhibition also includes commissioned works by Pamunkey and Monacan artists.

Exhibitions
“Taming Waters, Transforming Worlds: Law, Land, & Belonging in
Seventeenth-Century England & Virginia" (forthcoming, October 2026–June 2027)
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia
Lead Curator

“Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style and Racial Uplift” (2022)
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia
Graduate Curator and Community Engagement Coordinator

“The Taking of the Land: The English Colonization of Virginia” (2021)
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia
Digital Exhibition Designer

Publications
LeClair, Stacey. “The Holsinger Studio: The Customer Experience.” In Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style and Racial Uplift, exhibition catalogue edited by Holly Robertson. Charlottesville: Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, 2025.

Conference Presentations and Invited Talks

• LeClair, Stacey. “Landscapes of Custom: Jurisdiction and Territorial Authority in Virginia and the English Fens.” Roundtable: Legal Pluralism and Imperial Governance, American Society for Legal History (ASLH) Annual Meeting, Banff, Canada. November 2026. Forthcoming.
• LeClair, Stacey. “Drainage, Jurisdiction, and Identity from the Fens to the Chesapeake, 1580–1650.” Invited presentation to Chapter BK, P.E.O. Sisterhood, The Club at Glenmore, Keswick, Virginia. August 2026.
• LeClair, Stacey. “Law in Place: Water, Property, and the Formation of Civic Obligation.” Paper presented at the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) Society Annual Conference, King's College London, London, UK. July 2026.

Awards and Honors

• Albert Gallatin Research Fellowship, University of Virginia, Fall 2025
• SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2021–2025
• Canada Graduate Scholarships – Doctoral (CGS-D), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), 2021
• Graduate Fellow, John L. Nau III History and Principles of Democracy Lab, University of Virginia, 2021–2022
• Canada Graduate Scholarships – Master’s (CGS-M), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), 2019–2020