Education
Ph.D., History, University of Virginia, expected 2027
M.A., History, University of Virginia, 2022
M.A., History, University of Calgary, 2020
B.A. (with Distinction), History, University of Calgary, 2016

Biography
I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Virginia, originally from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. As a first-generation university graduate, I was drawn to the study of history through an early interest in how legal systems shape societies, landscapes, and governance. Before coming to Virginia, I completed an M.A. in English legal history at the University of Calgary, where I examined the centralization of local government in early modern England. I later earned a second M.A. at the University of Virginia, where my research focused on legal jurisdiction and Indigenous land claims in seventeenth-century Virginia.

My studies have been generously supported by multiple national awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the country’s most competitive and prestigious source of funding for research in the humanities and social sciences. My research continues to explore the relationship between law, land, and environment, with particular attention to how legal frameworks surrounding land and water shaped imperial expansion in the seventeenth century.

Research
My dissertation, Taming Waters, Transforming Worlds: Law, Land, and Lifeways in Seventeenth-Century England and Virginia, examines how legal frameworks governing land and water were transformed in early modern England and then carried across the Atlantic to shape English colonial expansion in Virginia. Focusing first on large-scale drainage projects in the English Fenlands, I trace how medieval and early-modern statutes were overhauled to permit enclosure, dyking, and the conversion of marsh into arable ground. In Virginia, those same principles of surveying, ordering, and reclaiming land, often championed by the very men who drafted England’s drainage laws, underpinned the charters, plantation codes, and assembly statutes that regulated waterways, allocated land grants, and structured settlement. By following this environmental-legal vocabulary from Lincolnshire sewers’ courts through Virginia Company patents, my dissertation demonstrates that the legal logic which reshaped England’s homeland served as the blueprint for building empire overseas.

Alongside my dissertation, I am curating an exhibition that brings this research into public conversation. Opening at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library in September 2026, the exhibition features seventeenth-century legal documents, maps, English, and Native American material culture to explore how legal thought and landscape transformation shaped the making of empire.

Exhibitions
“Taming Waters, Transforming Worlds: Law, Land, and Lifeways in Seventeenth-Century England and Virginia” (forthcoming, September 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.

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

Research Assistantships
Graduate Research Assistant, University of Virginia, 2023–Present
Project: American Indian Land Loss: Land Sales and the Loss of American Indian Property in the Twentieth Century (with Dr. Christian McMillen)

Graduate Research Assistant and Curator, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, 2022–2023
Project: Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift (Holsinger Studio Portrait Project)

Public History and Professional Internships
Graduate Research Intern, Pamunkey Indian Museum and Cultural Center, Summer 2024
Institute for Public History Summer Internship Program, University of Virginia

Graduate Intern, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, 2023 - 2024
PhD Plus Internship Program, University of Virginia