Dr. Sharon Webb is an Associate Professor in Digital Humanities in the History Department at the University of Sussex and a Director of the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab. She is a historian specialising in Irish associational culture and nationalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as a leading digital humanities practitioner with extensive experience in developing critical approaches to digital history and archival studies.

With an interdisciplinary background in history and computer science, Dr. Webb’s research sits at the intersection of digital humanities, critical archival studies, and digital preservation. Her expertise spans several key areas, including gender and technology, feminist and queer archives, critical digital archives, community heritage, and the socio-political impacts of technological development.

They have led, and been involved in, several innovative research projects, including: Principal Investigator (PI) for the AHRC-IRC funded project "Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities (2021-24), which explores feminist approaches to software development and technological infrastructures; Co-Investigator (Co-I) for the Women in Focus (2021-23)  project led by the University of East Anglia, examining the historical contributions of women in creative sectors; Co-I for the AHRC-IRC funded project The Intersections, Feminism, Technology & Digital Humanities network (IFTe) (2020-21), led by the University of Cambridge, addresses a critical challenge in contemporary society and culture, that is the gender imbalance in computational practices and systems; and for Co-I for the ESRC funded Reanimating Data project (2018-21), which focuses on digitizing and reinterpreting historical feminist social research data from the 1980s, making these records accessible and relevant for contemporary feminist scholarship.

Her current research includes studies on feminist approaches to software and technology, queer heritage and digital preservation, the histories of feminist collectives and technology, and the role of women in computing history. These initiatives aim to uncover and challenge structural inequalities in historical and contemporary technological contexts.

Dr. Webb is a co-founding member of the FACT///. network (Feminist Approaches to Computational Technology), a collective dedicated to feminist engagements with digital technology and computational methods. In 2021, she was appointed as one of the three Directors of the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab, further solidifying her leadership in advancing digital humanities research and fostering collaborative interdisciplinary scholarship.

Since 2017, Sharon was worked with Queer Heritage South, supporting the development of their digital archive which launced in 2021. They have been involved with various exhibitions and the development of queer public histories including Queer Code Breakers at Queer the Pier in the Brighton and Hove Museum.