Dr. Lauren MacDonald

Assistant Professor, Department of History

Lauren MacDonald is an assistant professor of history at Idaho State University. She graduated with PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University in 2018. Her research, focusing on religion and empire in the sixteenth-century Caribbean, has been supported by the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Fulbright Program, and the U.S. Department of Education.

At Idaho State University, she teaches classes on the Americas, religion, and world history. By focusing on collaborative reading, creative projects, and interactive discussion in her courses, she invites students to think analytically and cooperatively about complicated histories. She has served as the faculty advisor for ISU's local chapter of the national Phi Alpha Theta history honors society since 2021. Every spring, she brings ISU history students to exotic cities in other states -- Bellingham, Ellensburg, Cheney, Missoula -- to present their original historical research at the annual Pacific Northwest Regional Phi Alpha Theta conference. She hopes to teach students to develop self-directed habits of asking new questions and finding ways to answer those questions that will persist after they graduate from ISU.