Dr. Sheri Shuck-Hall

Director

Dr. Sheri Shuck-Hall is a professor in the Department of History at Christopher Newport and director of the Public History Center. She is the author of Journey to the West: The Alabama and Coushatta Indians (University of Oklahoma Press) and co-author of Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (University of Nebraska Press).

Shuck-Hall has worked as an expert on Southeastern tribes for museum exhibitions, and currently serves on the Advisory Committee for the Atlanta History Center as they develop a new gallery on Southeastern Indigenous peoples. She also assisted tribal advocates in legal cases to secure indigenous claims to ancestral lands.

With over 25 years of experience in the field of public history, she recently worked as a historic preservation expert for the Town of Cape Charles, Virginia, where she helped implement an economic impact survey and co-authored a study focusing on historic preservation best practices.

Shuck-Hall was awarded Outstanding American History Teacher of the Year in 2017 by the National Society Daughters of the Colonial Wars. She was one of two professors selected nationwide who were awarded for excellence in teaching and engaging students in American history.

Dr. Thomas Hall

Associate Director

Dr. Thomas Hall is an associate professor of finance and economics in the Luter School of Business at Christopher Newport and associate director of the Public History Center. He has more than three decades of experience analyzing data to generate actionable findings for government agencies, nonprofits and the private sector. His research has been supported by grants and commissions from various local governments as well as the National Park Service, Yale School of Management, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Virginia Aquarium, Dominion Energy, the OECD, the Mariners' Museum, Huntington Ingalls and the Fort Monroe Authority.

Hall’s research on determinants and trends in museum and public history attendance has been funded by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. His private sector experience includes management consulting for KPMG and PriceWaterhouseCoopers as well as serving in the Financial Analytics and Structured Transactions group at Bear Stearns Companies.

His research has been published in the Journal of Software, the Journal of Corporate Finance, the Quarterly Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Economic Issues. Recently, he was lead author of “Estimating the Economic Impact of a One-Time Event: The Case of l’Hermione in Yorktown,” appearing in Nonprofit Management and Leadership.