2014 Mass History Conference Presenter Profiles

Never Done! Interpreting the History of Women at Work in Massachusetts

Anne Ackerson, in a career spanning three decades, has served as director of several historic house museums and historical societies in central and eastern New York, the director of the Museum Association of New York, and now currently serves as the Executive Director of the National Council of State Archivists. In 1997 Anne began an independent consulting practice focusing on organizational development issues for the smaller nonprofit cultural institution, in which she has worked with a wide variety of cultural and heritage organizations ranging from museums to arts councils to orchestras and community theatres. Anne is a frequent workshop presenter and author, focusing on issues of board and organizational development, governance issues, and planning. She writes regularly about management and leadership issues for cultural institutions in her blog, Leading by Design. She is the co-author of a new book on history museum leadership for the 21st century titled Leadership Matters.

Llana Barber is an Assistant Professor in the American Studies department at the State University of New York – College at Old Westbury where she teaches courses in immigration and urban history. She received her PhD in History from Boston College in 2010, and is currently completing a book manuscript on the transition of Lawrence, Massachusetts to a Latino-majority city, tentatively titled “Latino City: Immigration and Urban Crisis in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1945-2000.”

Michelle Marchetti Coughlin is an independent scholar who holds graduate degrees in history and English and American literature. She is the author of One Colonial Woman’s World, which reconstructs the life of Mehetabel Chandler Coit (1673–1758), the author of what may be the earliest surviving diary by an American woman. In 2013 Michelle served as a Mass Humanities Scholar-in-Residence for the Westport Historical Society, researching the life of Elizabeth Cadman White (ca. 1685–1768), one of the first owners of the society’s historic Cadman-White-Handy House. This research was subsequently used in a Brown Center for Public Humanities course on historic house interpretation to develop programming for the Handy House. Michelle currently serves on the Board of the Abigail Adams Birthplace and is at work on a book about Penelope Pelham Winslow (ca. 1633–1703), the wife of Plymouth Colony governor Josiah Winslow. She maintains a website at www.onecolonialwomansworld.com.

Annie Davis is the Education Specialist for the National Archives at Boston, located in Waltham, where she coordinates public and education programs. Prior to being with the National Archives, Annie was the Coordinator of Education and Collections at the Forbes House Museum (Milton, MA), where she was responsible for exhibits and programs related to the extensive collection of 18th and 19th c. decorative arts from the American China Trade and a significant Lincoln collection. She was previously a manager in an educational software company, and was part of the interpretation staff at Adams National Historical Park (Quincy, MA).  Annie has taught high school in urban and suburban settings and is certified to teach history and English grades 7-12 in Massachusetts. She holds her BA in Literature from the University of California, San Diego, and a master’s degree in education from Harvard University.

Katherine Dibble joined the all-volunteer Boston Women’s Heritage Trail board after retiring from a 37 year career at the Boston Public Library. She is currently vice president of the board and often joins other members in giving tours of the seven neighborhood trails developed by BWHT which highlight sites in Boston important to women’s history. In 2012, when BWHT offered to give a tour featuring women who were active in Boston from 1630 to 1740 as part of the Partnership of the Historic Boston’s commemoration of Charter Day, she led the effort to research and plan the tour.

Rose A. Doherty, treasurer of The Partnership of the Historic Bostons, has been involved with commemorations of Boston Charter Day since 2004. Stirring the Pot, the theme of Charter day in 2012, allowed the Partnership to work with the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail to present women’s history in the early Massachusetts Bay Colony. Before Rose became really busy in retirement, she was an assistant dean and director of liberal arts and criminal justice at Northeastern University’s University College. Before that gig, she was academic dean and later chair of the board of trustees of Katharine Gibbs School, Gibbs College and has just released Katharine Gibbs: Beyond White Gloves, the history of a very American institution.

Maureen Ryan Doyle, co-chair of the Worcester Women’s Oral History Project, has presented oral history workshops at area colleges and high schools as well as community organizations. She is the co-author, of Voices of Worcester Women: 160 Years After the First Woman’s Rights Convention, that includes excerpts selected from the over 250 oral histories collected by the Worcester Women’s Oral History Project.  Ms. Ryan Doyle is a freelance writer and owner of a property management company in Central Massachusetts. She was the winner of the Good Housekeeping Magazine’s New Traditionalist writing competition.

Erica Fagen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include modern German history, the Holocaust, Public History, social media, and visual culture. She is interested in how Germans and people worldwide talk about Holocaust memory on digital media sites such as Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Her digital experience includes blogging and tweeting; for a graduate seminar in Digital History she helped create an AR (Augmented Reality) app about the “Lover’s Walk” exhibition at the Bytown Museum in Ottawa. She was also a research assistant for “Hate 2.0: Combating Right-Wing Extremism in the Age of Social Technology,” an inter-disciplinary research project that looked at how digital activists combat hate and neo-Nazism on social media sites. In Spring 2014, she facilitated the National Council on Public History and National Collaborative of Women’s History Sites Workshop “Wikipedia 101 for Women’s History (and Other Underrepresented Subjects)” in Monterey, California.

Kayla Haveles is the education coordinator at the American Antiquarian Society, where she works in the outreach department to develop and administer public and K-12 programing. She is also responsible for managing and editing the Society’s newsletter, the Almanac, and blog, pastispresent.org. Before coming to AAS, Haveles earned her M.A. in American history and public history at UMass Amherst and worked on the front line and in outreach at several historic sites, including Historic New England and the Emily Dickinson Museum. She currently serves on the steering committee of the Worcester Women’s History Project and is a founding board member of the Palmer Historical and Cultural Center.

Heather Huyck, President of NCWHS began as an interpreter at George Washington’s birthplace decades ago; she’s been concerned with how to interpret women’s history at historic places ever since. She has worked for the National Park Service, been a professional staffer for the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Parks, and taught at the College of William & Mary. She co-edited Women’s History: Sites and Resources (2009) and Revealing Women’s History: Best Practices for Interpreting Women’s History (2011) and has given numerous presentations nationwide. She is currently team teaching the NCWHS “Doing Women’s History at Your Site.” Dr. Huyck has a MA in Cultural Anthropology and BA/PhD in American History, and has visited 320 NPS units. In 2009 her students found 15,000 historic documents from banker and organizer Mrs. Maggie Walker, whose organization provided financial and community support during American Apartheid; they have worked on that Collection ever since then.

Kathryn Allamong Jacob is Curator of Manuscripts at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. Prior to joining the Schlesinger staff in 1996, Jacob was university archivist at Johns Hopkins University, the assistant historian of the United States Senate, assistant program director at the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and assistant director of the American Jewish Historical Society. Jacob graduated from Goucher College and earned her PhD in American history from Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of three books: Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D.C. After the Civil War (Smithsonian Press, 1994), Testament to Union: Civil War Monuments in Washington, DC. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), and King of the Lobby: The Life and Times of Sam Ward (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) and many articles. Her particular interests at the Schlesinger are women’s diaries, documenting girlhood, and women’s reproductive lives.

Laura Linard is the Director, Baker Special Collections, Harvard Business School.

Charlene L. Martin, co-chair of the Worcester Women’s Oral History Project, has presented oral history workshops at area colleges and high schools as well as community organizations. She is the co-author, of Voices of Worcester Women: 160 Years After the First Woman’s Rights Convention, that includes excerpts selected from the over 250 oral histories collected by the Worcester Women’s Oral History Project. Dr. Martin has over 30 years of experience in higher education and is the former dean of continuing education at Assumption College and founding director of the Worcester Institute for Senior Education.

Cliff McCarthy is the archivist at the Lyman & Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History and at the Stone House Museum in Belchertown. He is also the President of the Pioneer Valley History Network, a not-for-profit consortium of historical institutions in Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin Counties. Cliff is the author or co-author of several books on the history of Belchertown and he writes occasionally for the local newspaper, the Sentinel.

Marla Miller‘s primary research interest is U.S. women’s work before industrialization. Her book The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (2006) won the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award for the best book in the field for that year. Her book Betsy Ross and the Making of America (2010)—a scholarly biography of that much-misunderstood early American craftswoman—was a finalist for the Cundill Prize in History at McGill University (the world’s largest non-fiction historical literature prize), and was named to the Washington Post’s “Best of 2010” list. Her most recent publication, a biography of Massachusetts gownmaker Rebecca Dickinson, appeared in the Westview Press series Lives of American Women in summer 2013. Director of the UMass History Department’s Public History program, Marla became interested in Wikipedia through her work on the project Historic Dress and has led workshops on Wikipedia editing at both the 2013 and 2014 meetings of the National Council on Public History.

Rebecca Mlynarczyk is Professor of English Emerita from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Having retired from full-time teaching in 2011, she currently works as the faculty consultant for the CUNY Pipeline Program for Careers in College Teaching and Research, a mentoring program for students from underrepresented groups. Rebecca has researched and written several community publications including Growing Up at 857: A Remembrance of Life at the Beginning of the [Twentieth] Century, and The Plainfield Project: A Community Caring for One of Its Own. She is currently working on a study of successful aging in women entitled Coming of Age in Plainfield: Stories of Successful Aging in a Massachusetts Hilltown. Rebecca received her Ph.D. in applied linguistics from New York University in 1993.

Kathleen Banks Nutter is the Accessioning Archivist for the Sophia Smith Collection (SSC), Smith College, where she also processes collections for research use, provides on-site student instruction, answers long-distance reference requests, manages the SSC’s schedule of class orientations, and sits on the advisory committee for the Archives Concentration. Since earning her M.A. and Ph.D. in women’s labor history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Nutter taught at Smith and other area colleges and held an appointment as Lecturer in the History Department at Stony Brook University from 2003 to 2011. She is the author of The Necessity of Organization: Mary Kenney O’Sullivan and Trade Unionism for Women, 1892-1912 (Garland Publishing, 2000) and several articles, including “‘Militant Mothers’: Boston, Busing and the Bicentennial,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts (Fall 2010).

Jenny O’Neill is the Executive Director of the Westport (MA) Historical Society. Her current focus is the Cadman-White-Handy House (c. 1713) which will be opened, for the first time, to the public in summer of 2014. The Handy House encompasses a multi-disciplinary approach to community engagement with the past including archaeology, architectural analysis and conservation, and the exploration of the stories and social history of the many individuals associated with this property.

Jennifer Pustz is the museum historian at Historic New England, where she conducts and coordinates social history research for the organization’s historic sites, exhibitions, and publications. She holds a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Iowa and M.A. and B.A. degrees in art history. Prior to moving to New England, she was the historian at Brucemore, a National Trust Historic Site in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She is the author of Voices from the Back Stairs: Interpreting Servants’ Lives at Historic House Museums (Northern Illinois University Press, 2010) and a contributing author of Historic New England’s America’s Kitchens publication (2009).

Sam Redman, an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializes in 19th and 20th century U.S. history with a focus on culture and ideas. In 2012, he completed his doctoral dissertation, “Human Remains and the Construction of Race and History, 1897-1945” at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, Redman worked at the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) where he completed dozens of oral history interviews on a wide variety of subjects. At ROHO, he served as Lead Interviewer for the Rosie the Riveter / WWII Home Front Oral History Project and the Japanese American Confinement Sites Oral History Project – both in collaboration with the National Park Service. Working with a team at ROHO, he launched a project documenting the oral history of the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge resulting in the completion of over a dozen new interviews with men and women who worked on the bridge. Redman also worked in several museums including the Field Museum of Natural History, Colorado History Museum, and Science Museum of Minnesota. He is the author of Historical Research in Archives: A Practical Guide published by the American Historical Association in 2013.

Elizabeth Sharpe is a historian, educator, and consultant for museums. The former Director of Education at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, she holds a doctorate in American history from the University of Delaware and a master’s from the Cooperstown Graduate Program. She is the author of In the Shadow of the Dam: the Aftermath of the Mill River Flood of 1874 and Amherst A to Z, 1759-2009. She is currently teaching online history courses for UMass Amherst and Greenfield Community College. She researched 19th-century women’s writing about caregiving and end-of-life while a Research Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center at Mount Holyoke College in 2011-12.

Madelyn Shaw is an independent curator specializing in the exploration of American history and culture through textiles and dress. She is lead author and co-curator of the award-winning Civil War sesquicentennial book and traveling exhibition, Homefront & Battlefield: Quilts & Context in the Civil War. Other recent projects include the exhibition Color Revolution: Science Meets Style in the 1960s for the American Textile History Museum (2013) and the publications Clothing through American History: The British Colonial Era for ABC-Clio Press (with Kathleen Staples, 2013), “Slave Cloth and Clothing Slaves: Craftsmanship, Commerce, and Industry” in the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts (2012), “Silk in Georgia, 1732-1840: Sericulture to Status Symbol” in Proceedings of the Third Biennial Henry D. Greene Symposium (2008), and “H. R. Mallinson & Company” in American Silk: Entrepreneurs & Artifacts, 1830-1930 (2007), winner of the Millia Davenport Publication Award.

Janet H. Spitz has served as the Executive Director of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library since 2009. She oversaw the development and opening in October 2011 of the center’s new physical space which includes an exhibition gallery, learning center, map storage and offices. She directed the presentation of the exhibition, Torn in Two: 150th Anniversary of the Civil War in Boston and its national tour. For over 25 years Jan Spitz has served in leadership positions at educational and cultural institutions in Massachusetts, Ohio and Washington, D.C. She has led strategic initiatives in audience development at the Worcester Art Museum, an international teacher training program at Perkins School for the Blind, and fundraising campaigns at these two institutions as well as the Museum of Fine Arts and the Wang Center for the Performing Arts. She has an advanced degree in Art History.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University and a past President of the American Historical Association. She is the author of many articles and books on early American history, including A Midwife’s Tale, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991. Her 2001 book, The Age of Homespun, is organized around fourteen domestic items, including a linen tablecloth, two Indian baskets, and an unfinished stocking. She has consulted for museums and historical societies nationwide. During her tenure as a MacArthur Fellow, she worked on the production of a PBS documentary based on A Midwife’s Tale. Her work is also featured on an award-winning website called dohistory.org. Her more recent work includes Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007) and “Tangible Things,” a 2011 exhibit of artworks and artifacts from Harvard’s many collections that she co-curated with Ivan Gaskell. A book based on the exhibit will be published next year by Oxford University Press. She is currently completing A House Full of Females: Faith and Family in Nineteenth-century Mormon Diaries.

Patricia Campbell Warner, Professor Emerita, Costume History at UMass Amherst, was born and educated in Toronto, Canada, receiving her B.A. in Art and Archaeology at the University of Toronto. Her M.A. and Ph.D. in design and the history of design were completed at the University of Minnesota almost thirty years later. She retired in June 2007 after being a historian of dress at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since 1988, latterly as Professor in the Theater Department, where she neither designed, draped, nor built. She has published and spoken widely in various scholarly journals and books on various aspects of the history of dress, including jewelry, slave clothing and the movies, but her major focus has been the subject of her book, When the Girls Came Out to Play (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), on women’s clothing for sports and the birth of American sportswear. She is a Fellow of the Costume Society of America.