Sharon M. Leon
Sharon M. Leon
Community Councilor
Sharon M. Leon is the Chief Operating Officer of Digital Scholar, the not for profit steward of a host of open source digital scholarship and cultural heritage software projects, including Zotero, PressForward, and Tropy. Leon is also the long-time director of the software team that designs and supports the Omeka web publishing platform. Prior to joining Digital Scholar full time, Leon had a twenty year academic career as a tenured digital public historian at George Mason and Michigan State universities. Her first book, An Image of God: the Catholic Struggle with Eugenics, was published by University of Chicago Press. Leon is currently at work on a digital project to surface and analyze the community networks and experiences of the cohort of people enslaved and sold by the Maryland Province Jesuits in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. In a related Mellon Foundation-funded project, On These Grounds, she is developing a linked data ontology to describe the lived experiences of enslaved people who labored for colleges and universities.