[1] An environmental historian, she has focused on the nineteenth-century United States, urban public spaces, and the history of science.

[3] Her dissertation, "The Swinish Multitude and Fashionable Promenades" won Yale University's John Addison Porter Prize, the Urban History Association's Award for Best Dissertation, and the American Society for Environmental History's Rachel Carson Prize.

[4][5][6] After a Bernard and Irene Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellowship at the New-York Historical Society and the New School, McNeur became an assistant professor at Portland State University in 2013, earning tenure in 2017.

[9][10][11][12][13] In 2023, McNeur published her second book, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science (Basic Books, 2023) having uncovered the lives of the entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris and botanist Elizabeth Carrington Morris while researching a different project.

[15][16][17][18] McNeur has taught courses at Portland State University on writing biographies of marginalized scientists for Wikipedia, partnering with WikiEDU.