Amanda DeGiorgis, librarian of the nuclear age
Amanda DeGiorgis graduated with a PhD in Medieval History in 2008. She is currently a classified reference librarian at the Los Alamos National Lab, where she works with records cataloguing the history of the Manhattan Project and the building of the first atomic bomb.
Amanda completed her undergraduate degree in History at Smith College, a liberal arts college in the United States, before coming to St Andrews for her PhD in 2003. “My PhD, sometimes I say, was the thing I did for me,” she explained. “I’ve always been interested in history, I love medieval history, I love medieval English history. So it was five years of getting to do something that I wanted to do and see it through.” Amanda’s thesis was on Henry II of England and his monastic patronage. “I have a ten year old daughter, I show her my thesis at times. It still comes up, I still sometimes have to pinch myself that I did it,” she said. “The PhD was crucial to where I am today and who I am today, for showing me I could succeed outside of my comfort zone.”
Though her work today is largely rooted in modern history, Amanda still keeps in touch with her medieval interests. “I still have the ancient drives that I saved everything on. I still have a lot of my books that I accumulated during the PhD.” Over the course of her thesis, she built a database on Filemaker Pro, collecting all of the charters of Henry II that pertained to his church patronage. She tracked down about 1200 charters to create a searchable database.
Beyond her thesis, Amanda also has fond recollections of the town. “I used to wake up early, and I’d go run along the beach, all through town. It was always so magical because it was so quiet, the sun would be coming up and you would see a few people, but it was like the town was mine,” she recalled.
Living abroad for five years, “shaped who I am, [and helped me] figure out what I’m capable of.” Her time at St Andrews also helped Amanda discover what she wanted to do with a history degree. “The part that I loved the most was the research, and the library archive space,” she explained, informing her decision to journey into the library world. “History still is my passion,” she said. “Being able to apply it to the library world and helping other people find the information and the history and the resources became a much bigger part of what I wanted to do.”
After submitting her thesis, Amanda moved back to the United States. She spent a year working as a fraud manager at a credit union, before making the decision to pursue a master’s in library studies. After graduating, she started off as a librarian at a public library in Massachusetts. In a year and a half, she was promoted to Director, a position she held for the next 10 years. “Being a library director, I learnt a lot about people, about managing people, managing a budget — a whole different skillset,” she explained. “The skills that I gained doing research helped with that.”
In 2022, Amanda left the Mason and Ramsdell Libraries to work as a classified reference librarian at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she works today. Los Alamos was established in 1943, as part of the Manhattan Project, to develop the world’s first nuclear weapons. In 1945, they successfully tested the first atomic bomb. At Los Alamos, Amanda’s work is rooted in interactions with history. “I’m looking at the last 80 years of history for Los Alamos and that’s an everyday thing,” she explained. “A lot of my professional development […] is reading through historical works on atomic energy and science, the cold war — so it’s finally come full circle, where I get to do things that I really love to do.”
Amanda explained that her research skills were crucial to her appointment at Los Alamos. “They really liked the fact that I had done the PhD,” she explained. Not many people have both a research background but also library skills. “They knew they could let me lose and I could find things and come back with them. I knew how the whole process worked.”
The holdings at Los Alamos contain historical documents from the start of Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, as well as scientific data recording years of research. With memos, drawings, a video collection, radio-graphs, reports, and books, “[the] archive really spans everything that you can think about,” Amanda explained. She works with material from the 1940s, but also records from the digital age. As the largest technical library in America, “we have millions of holdings, which is astounding,” she said.
“A lot of the research done today is still heavily based on what’s in the archive because we don’t do nuclear testing anymore,” Amanda explained. “We are very reliant on all the data that has been collected over the last 80 years.” At Los Alamos, the past impacts the present and informs the future. “The archive is something that is still living and breathing, being added to and being used.”
“Going through the Manhattan Project collection and getting to touch documents that were signed by these very famous scientists was mind-blowing,” Amanda said. Her interest in medieval history was shaped by her interest in archival work. Now, over her career, she has had the chance to “see and read and touch lots of really cool things”.
History has been key across Amanda’s career. “The skills you gain as a historian — the writing, being able to take in information, and synthesise it and communicate it back is huge,” she explained. Despite hearing doubts about career prospects with a history degree, Amanda is confident that it has served her well. “History is not limiting, it can be a part of any job,” she explained. Her career has taught her to be open to possibility. “When I started I thought I’m going to be a professor, and I’m not,” she explained. “I have found a way to take what I enjoy and make a job out of it. The forks in the road can be quite interesting too.”
Amanda’s advice for history students today, is to keep with it. “Don’t let people tell you that history’s not relevant, because it’s not true,” she said. “‘To me if you don’t understand where you’ve been, you can’t know where you’re going to go. There are so many things to learn from the past, to help us navigate a better world”
This profile was written by Mrunmayi Kamerkar, MA International Relations and Modern History (2027), who interviewed Amanda DeGiorgis in May 2026