Sasha Coles

I am a historian of the nineteenth-century United States with an interest in women and gender, labor and capital, and religious belief and practice. I received my PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and worked at the University of Utah before joining Penn State in August 2021.

My first book, tentatively titled Home Industry: A History of Utah’s Silk Experiment and Mormon Women’s Authority, focuses on the women workers who attempted to establish a self-sufficient silk industry in western Latter-day Saint (or Mormon) settlements. By most measurements, they failed. Even so, my work sheds light on how and why this “home industry” endured for over 50 years. 

I am a passionate researcher. I am also a public history practitioner. From 2017 to 2025, for example, I built and managed the Enchanted Archives, a digital public history platform that uncovered the historical roots of Disney park food, aesthetics, and attractions. The 24 essays and two walking tours on the platform offered a new layer of storytelling to the Disney park experience. 

Recent Publications

“Mormon Women, Mulberry Trees, and Narratives of Utah’s Environmental Transformation,” Branching Out: The Public History of Trees, eds. Leah Glaser and Phil Levy (February 2025).

“‘A Common Struggle for Refinement’: Mormon Women, Railroad Reconstruction, and the Politics of Respectability in Salt Lake City, 1869-1877,” Journal of Women’s History 33, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 36-60.

Recent Undergraduate Courses 

HIST 11: World Civilizations since 1500

HIST 20: American Civilization to 1877

HIST 112: Introduction to Public History

HIST/WMNST 117: Women in US History

HIST 156: History of the American Worker

HIST 451: The Consumer Revolution