Sam Van Doran graduated summa cum laude from Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore in January 2015 with a BA with honors in history. Her senior thesis - "'And this is the wretchedness of that fatal kingdom': Spencer, Moryson, and the Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland" examined Elizabethan justification for the conquest of Ireland and how Irish campaigns informed the colonization of Virginia.
Since her time at Loyola, Sam has continued to explore the role history plays in shaping our world - namely at the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), an advocacy and policy organization based in Manhattan which fights for the rights of all New Yorkers regardless of immigration status. Starting as an AmeriCorps VISTA fellow in 2015, Sam became a member of the NYIC's permanent staff after her fellowship ended and has led much of the Coalition's fundraising and communications efforts over the last three years, becoming the NYIC Manager of Development in February 2018. Her time on the NYIC's development team - writing grant proposals, editing policy reports, and leading tens of thousands of New Yorkers over the Brooklyn Bridge - has shown her the importance of social justice work and, most of all, the need to bring a historical perspective to advocacy and policy work that aims to protect the most vulnerable individuals. Sam hopes that her courses and research at Columbia and LSE will allow her to take the study of history beyond platitudes (i.e. that it is doomed to repeat if we do not understand it) to practical use in this field.
