Wellesley-Deerfield Symposium Panelists

Tamar W. Carroll is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of History, Rochester Institute of Technology, where she is also a faculty affiliate in the Museum Studies program. Her research focuses on the history of social movements in the U.S., particularly in the post-WWII period. She is the author of Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty and Feminist Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).  She is co-editor of Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election (University of Rochester Press, 2018). Tamar is co-curator of the touring photo exhibit and multimedia companion website “Whose Streets? Our Streets!”: New York City, 1980-2000, online at whosestreets.photo.  

Simone Drake is the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor of the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University, where she serves as Department Chair and Director of the AAAS Community Extension Center. Her interdisciplinary research agenda focuses on how people of African descent in the Americas negotiate the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation through the lenses of critical race, gender, and legal studies. She is the author of When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making (University of Chicago Press 2016) and Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity (Louisiana State University Press 2014, Southern Literary Studies Series); co-editor (with Dwan Henderson) of Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Duke University Press 2020); and numerous journal articles and book chapters. She serves on the editorial board of Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men (Indiana University Press).

Corinne Field is an Associate Professor of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia.  She is currently completing a monograph with the working title “Grand Old Women and Modern Girls: Age, Race, and Power in the US Women’s Rights Movement, 1830 to 1920” and co-editing with LaKisha Simmons an interdisciplinary anthology on the global history of black girlhood.  She is the author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America and co-editor with Nicholas Syrett of Age in America: Colonial Era to the Present.  In 2018-2019, she was the Mellon-Schlesinger Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University and a Drawn-to-Art Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society.  

Mariah Gruner is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Boston University, where she works as a Graduate Writing Fellow. She earned her BA in Cultural Anthropology from Tufts University and has a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from BU. Her work examines the material culture of gender, exploring how craft is gendered and gender is crafted. Her work has been published in Material Culture Review and SEQUITUR. She is currently working on her dissertation “Stitching Selfhood, Materializing Gender: The Political Uses of American Women’s Decorative Needlework, 1820-1920.” She is also the program coordinator for the Boston University Public Humanities Undergraduate Fellowship Program.

Elsie Heung received her PhD in Art History and certificate in American Studies from the Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2018. Her dissertation is entitled, “Women’s Suffrage in American Art: Recovering Forgotten Contexts, 1900-1920.” She was a 2014 recipient of the Capital Fellowship from the US Capitol Historical Society. From 2010–2013, Elsie worked as a curatorial assistant to Gail Levin in the retrospective exhibition, Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art. With support from the New Media Lab at CUNY, she was also responsible for designing and maintaining a comprehensive website dedicated to the life and career of Theresa Bernstein. 

Allison K. Lange is an Assistant Professor of History at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in history from Brandeis University. Lange’s book, Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, will be published in May 2020 by the University of Chicago Press. The book focuses on the ways that women’s rights activists and their opponents used images to define gender and power during the suffrage movemen.  Lange has also worked with the National Women’s History Museum and curated exhibitions for the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center. For the 2020 centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, she is curating exhibitions at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Harvard’s Schlesinger Library.

Martyna Majewska is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of St Andrews, preparing a dissertation entitled “Reclaiming Representation, Resisting Overdetermination: African American Artists Performing for the Camera since 1970,” supervised by Dr Catherine Spencer and funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. She also works as a tutor in the School of Art History at St Andrews. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of St Andrews (2016) and holds an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute (2017). She has worked in a number of art museums and galleries in Poland, Italy, the UK and the USA, and served as a research assistant in the modern and contemporary department of Poland’s leading auction house. 

Heather Munro Prescott is a Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University.  She received her undergraduate degree in Comparative Religion, summa cum laude, from the University of Vermont in 1984. She received her M.A. (1989) and Ph.D. (1994) in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University.  Dr. Prescott’s research and teaching interests include U.S. women’s history, history of medicine and public health, history of childhood, and disability history. Her first book, A Doctor of Their Own: The History of Adolescent Medicine, received the Will Solimene Award of Excellence in Medical Communication from the New England Chapter, American Medical Writers Association. Her most recent book is The Morning After: A History of Emergency Contraception (Rutgers University Press 2011). She is currently working on a book on the a cultural history of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Laura R. Prieto is Alumni Chair in Public Humanities and Professor of History and of Women’s and Gender Studies at Simmons University in Boston. Her first book was At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in the United States (Harvard University Press). Her current research studies women and American empire, a topic on which she has published in several academic journals and anthologies, including Crossings and Encounters: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Atlantic World, which she co-edited with Stephen R. Berry, forthcoming in summer 2020 from the University of South Carolina Press. She is also working with her students on an exhibit on the history of Boston’s lost West End neighborhood, and on a series of public humanities programs marking the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Emma Rothberg is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Raised in New York City, she received her B.A. from Wesleyan University before matriculating to UNC. Her dissertation examines urban parading around the turn of the twentieth century and the ways in which parades reflected contemporaneous debates over American citizenship and democracy. The paper she presents today, which will become a part of her dissertation, reflects her initial thoughts on how women’s suffrage advocates used the well-established parade format in order to make claims on and shift gendered understanding of urban space and first-class citizenship.