My Background​

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Growing up, my brother and I had the incredible opportunity to travel with my father when he taught history overseas. I lived for a summer in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, where I loved making friends and attending school. My early traveling gave me the chance to experience places outside of Wisconsin and inspired me to move following high school. 

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​Following some time in Westchester, New York, I moved to San Francisco for nine years and Los Angeles for five, where I pursued the arts and worked in a variety of corporate positions as well as commercial and film production. While living in California, I became interested in the California Gold Rush and California Native American history.

My passion for history brought me back to Wisconsin, where I received my B.S. in Archaeology and minor in English at UW-La Crosse and M.S. in Anthropology and Public History from UW-Milwaukee.

 

The many interesting positions I have held in archaeology and anthropology over the years have all provided much valuable knowledge and insight, including my Berkeley field school at the Fort Ross California Site, assisting with field work in Pinedale, Wyoming, on the Archaeological Investigations at the Lander Trail New Fork River Crossing Historical Park, the Aztalan Site in Lake Mills, WI, and the Upper Minnesota Oneota Site in La Crosse, WI. I appreciate the knowledge I attained working cultural resource management projects in Milwaukee, Madison, and Bayfield, Wisconsin. 

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It was particularly rewarding transcribing oral histories both at Jewish Museum Milwaukee and the letters I transcribed for Dr. Mark Koerner about his father, Peter Koerner, a Special Investigations Officer in the Korean War. In print, Windows on a War: The Korean War As Seen By Peter Koerner, USAF, 1950-1953.

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​I also enjoyed interviewing members of the Milwaukee community for a large-scale ethnic study led by Dr. Jill Florence Lackey. I respect each individual's contributions to the study and the heartfelt stories they shared with me. In print, Lackey, J.F. (2013). Ethnic Practices in the Early Twenty-First Century: The Milwaukee Study. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 

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Academic Writing and Research:

1) Unity in Numbers: The Archaeology of the Demimonde (1840-1917).

https://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/37458 

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2) The Archaeology of Working-Class Children in the Nineteenth Century in New York's Five Points Neighborhood and Paterson, New Jersey.

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3) Bringing Humanity to Keith’s Siding: A Twentieth-Century Logging and Railroad Settlement in Northern Wisconsin.

https://uwm.academia.edu/MeganSharpless

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4) Eastern European Jewish Heritage: Adapting Old World Traditions with a Modern World through Storytelling, Artifacts, and Place-making.

https://uwm.academia.edu/MeganSharpless

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I've always believed that learning about the past can bridge humanity forward. When we look back, we can learn from the many wrongs that have been done. These mistakes in history provides us with wisdom and compassion in moving forward. 

 

Different oral storytelling traditions and the written word help us to remember past events in history and shed light on individual perspectives. People's stories keep our histories alive and relevant in the present and foster empathy for our fellow human beings. It's powerful to hear someone else's story and pass these stories down to younger generations.​​