I’m Rwany Sibaja, an associate professor in the history department at Appalachian State University, where I also serve as the director of the History Education Program.

My work in history education focuses on the impact of new media on the teaching, learning, and scholarship of history. As a cultural historian of modern Latin American history, focusing on sports and leisure, I focus on the educational approaches for teaching cultural history in an approach informed by critical media studies, digital storytelling, creating digital archives and collections, and data-geographic visualizations.

As a history/social studies education director, my specialty in digital history intersects with the burgeoning field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, or SoTL. Before coming to App State, I helped develop educational projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, where I wrote reviews and published content for Teachinghistory.org, led workshops and training for professional K-12 social studies teachers, helped teachers incorporate technology in the classroom, and contributed to other initiatives related to history education. As a faculty member at App State, I am part of the Digital Humanities working group and co-facilitate a faculty group focused on Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs).

I completed my Ph.D. in History at George Mason University (Fairfax, VA), an M.A. in History at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a B.A. in History from Elon University (formerly Elon College), where I studied as a NC Teaching Fellow. I grew up in Los Angeles (CA), Miami (FL), San José (Costa Rica), and Fayetteville (NC). My hobbies include playing pick-up games (any sport available), collecting comic books, watching movies, and traveling. Now I get to share those same interests with my children, alongside my wife of almost 20 years (and our two-year-old Brittany, Django).