Stacey Crystal LeClair

Education
Ph.D., History, University of Virginia, expected 2027
M.A., History, University of Virginia, 2023
M.A., History, University of Calgary, 2020
B.A. (with Distinction), History, University of Calgary, 2016

Biography
I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate and first-generation college student, originally from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. My academic career began with the study of Elizabethan England, where debates over sovereignty, jurisdiction, and property drew me toward the history of law. After two years of professional experience in the legal sector in Canada, I became invested in how legal institutions operate and how legal frameworks organize power in practice. Before coming to Virginia, I completed an M.A. in History at the University of Calgary, specializing in English legal history, with a thesis examining the centralization of local government in early modern England. I later earned an M.A. in History at the University of Virginia, focused on legal jurisdiction and Indigenous land claims in seventeenth-century Virginia.

My research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the premier federal funding body for humanities and social sciences research, and I am a three-time recipient of its nationally competitive awards.

Research
My dissertation, "Drainage, Jurisdiction, and Identity from the Fens to the Chesapeake, 1580–1650," treats England's Fenlands and colonial Virginia as parts of a single legal and environmental history. The project examines how early modern ideas of "improvement" (the drive to drain marshes, construct embankments, survey land, and reorganize property for productivity and the public good) emerged within England and circulated across the Atlantic. Drawing on water-law records from the Lincolnshire Fens alongside Virginia Company charters, statutes, and maps, I trace how legal frameworks developed to reorganize wetlands and override customary rights in England created new forms of jurisdiction and authority. Those same legal logics later shaped the English colonization of the Chesapeake, where they structured claims to land, governance, and belonging while denying Indigenous peoples authority over their territories and political autonomy. By following the networks of investors, officials, and promoters involved in both drainage and settlement schemes, my dissertation shows that processes often described separately as English state formation and American colonization unfolded together. Landscapes in both places became sites where new forms of legal authority could be asserted, contested, and institutionalized, transforming both the environment and the meaning of subjecthood within the emerging English empire.

Alongside my dissertation, I am curating "Taming Waters, Transforming Worlds," a major exhibition opening at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at UVA in October 2026, the first exhibition led by a graduate student in the Department of History. Drawing directly from my dissertation research, the exhibition brings together seventeenth-century legal documents, maps, and English and Native American material culture to explore how legal thought and landscape transformation shaped the making of empire. Timed to coincide with America 250, the national commemoration of the United States' semiquincentennial, the exhibition offers a longer view of the American Revolution, tracing the legal and environmental transformations that shaped colonial society in the century before independence. Developed in close partnership with the Pamunkey Indian Museum & Cultural Center, the exhibition includes commissioned works by Pamunkey and Monacan artists.

Exhibitions
“Taming Waters, Transforming Worlds: Law, Land, & Belonging in
Seventeenth-Century England & Virginia" (forthcoming, October 2026–June 2027)
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia
Chief Curator

“Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style and Racial Uplift” (2022)
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia
Graduate Curator and Community Engagement Coordinator

“The Taking of the Land: The English Colonization of Virginia” (2021)
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia
Digital Exhibition Designer

Publications
LeClair, Stacey. “The Holsinger Studio: The Customer Experience.” In Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style and Racial Uplift, exhibition catalogue edited by Holly Robertson. Charlottesville: Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, 2025.

Awards and Honors

• Albert Gallatin Research Fellowship, University of Virginia, Fall 2025
• SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2021–2025
• Canada Graduate Scholarships – Doctoral (CGS-D), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), 2021
• Graduate Fellow, John L. Nau III History and Principles of Democracy Lab, University of Virginia, 2021–2022
• Canada Graduate Scholarships – Master’s (CGS-M), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), 2019–2020