Isaac Shearn PhD, M.A.

Isaac Shearn earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Florida in 2014 with a specialization in Archaeology. He then served as an adjunct professor at CCBC, UB, Morgan State, and Coppin State—teaching courses in Anthropology, Archaeology, Sociology, Forensic Anthropology, and Human-Environment Adaptations, among others—until joining the Department of Applied Social and Political Science as a Senior Lecturer in 2026. His early research investigated the archaeology and ethnohistory of the Caribbean and South America, with a focus on spatial methods, including the integration of three-dimensional photogrammetric mapping techniques. In 2017, he began to collaborate will fellow Coppin professor Dr. Elgin Klugh on the Laurel Cemetery Memorial Project.

Incorporated in 1852 as Baltimore’s first nondenominational cemetery for African Americans, Laurel Cemetery was a premiere burying ground until it was surreptitiously demolished in 1958, despite legal challenges from descendent communities. Shearn currently oversees the compilation of a digital database containing over 30,000 names of individuals interred at Laurel, transcribed from death certificates by student interns and volunteers from the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society. The database will provide unique insights into Black history in Baltimore and will be an invaluable resource for descendants to locate ancestors and reconnect with their family histories. The work interrogates the structural inequalities that led to the demolition and raises important questions about the politics of memory. In 2023, he and Klugh co-edited a volume on their findings, and the racial and political inequality manifest in the erasure of this historically significant site entitled "A Place for Memory: Baltimore’s Historic Laurel Cemetery."