Julie Richter

Bio

In her position as the Director of the National Institute of American History & Democracy (NIAHD) at William & Mary, Julie Richter directs the Pre-College Program in American History and NIAHD’s Program in Public History & Material Culture for William & Mary undergraduates and graduate students.  NIAHD’s programs connect students with experiential, hands-on learning experiences and use visits to historic sites and museums to teach history where it happened.  A faculty affiliate in the Harrison Ruffin Tyler Department of History at William & Mary, Richter teaches NIAHD’s Internship in Public History class and independent study classes that focus on Public History.  She has an AB in American Studies from Smith College where her Material Culture class included visits to Historic Deerfield, and she spent time conducting research in the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History.

 Richter worked in the Historical Research Department and the Architectural Research Department at Colonial Williamsburg during the time she received her MA in American Studies and PhD in American History from William & Mary.  Richter also was the Project Manager for Virtual Jamestown, a consultant for the Colonial National Historical Park, a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (2019-2021), and a Faculty Fellow in the Office of Strategic Cultural Partnerships (2022-2023).  In addition to thinking critically about how museums and historic sites teach history, her current research focuses on women in eighteenth-century Williamsburg, the ways in which women used spaces throughout the colonial capital, and lives of the scholars who attended Williamsburg’s Bray School. Richter’s recent publications include “Preparing to Open the Bray School on September 29, 1760,” in Maureen Elgersman Lee and Nicole Brown, eds., The Williamsburg Bray School Letters: A Community Speaks (2024) and “Reading, and, possibly, writing”: Revisiting the History of the Williamsburg Bray Schools in Eighteenth-Century Virginia” with Antonio T. Bly and Nicole Brown, in Samuel DeJulio and Leah Duran, eds., Exploring and Expanding Literacy Histories of the United States: A Spotlight on Under-Recognized Histories (2024).