Board of Directors

Ida E. Jones

Co-President

Ida E. Jones is the Associate Director of Special Collections and University Archivist at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. A native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, she graduated with a B.A. in News Editorial Journalism and a Ph.D. in American History from Howard University. Throughout her career she remains committed to service within the profession of history and archives. She provides consultant services for persons & organizations interested in learning about the archival process. She serves as an adjunct instructor for Lancaster Bible College.

Her scholarship is evident in numerous publications, speaking engagements, as well as, radio and television appearances. Her publications include book reviews, a variety of encyclopedia entries and four monographs. Her first book The Heart of the Race Problem: the Life of Kelly Miller was self-published in 2011 and her recent book Baltimore Civil Rights Leader Victorine Q. Adams the Power of the Ballot was published in 2019. All of her publications and larger research interest explore the archival documentation of individuals who lived impactful lives and left a tangible legacy.

A lover of historical fiction and documentaries, she is a consummate scholar who believes deeply in the words of Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune who stated “power must walk hand in hand with humility and the intellect must have a soul.”

Judith Wellman

Vice President

Judith Wellman is Principal Investigator, Historical New York Research Associates, and Professor Emerita, State University of New York at Oswego. She has more than 40 years of experience in research, teaching, cultural resource surveys, and grants administration. She specializes in historic sites relating to women’s history, the Underground Railroad, and African American communities, with almost forty National Register nominations and a dozen cultural resource surveys. With a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, Judith Wellman taught history at the State University of New York at Oswego from 1972-2010. Scholarly writings include The Road to Seneca Falls (University of Illinois, 2004) and Brooklyn’s Promised Land: The Free Black Community of Weeksville, N.Y. (New York University, 2014).

Dr. Wellman has worked as a consultant and principal investigator on award-winning projects with the National Park Service, National Endowment for the Humanities and many other organizations. She has extensive experience working local organizations and giving talks and workshops for teachers and public audiences. She is currently working on sites relating to women’s suffrage in New York State, as well as research on the Underground Railroad in Niagara Falls.

Robyn Young

Secretary

Robyn Young is an independent scholar and women’s historian dedicated to sharing women’s history with the general public through Hera’s House, A Traveling Women’s History Show. Through her efforts since 2001, Young has received approval from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission for 25 roadside historical markers and 4 of the William G Pomeroy Foundation/NVWT markers throughout Pennsylvania. Nineteen are for women’s history sites; the other two are for the site of the Lynching of Zachariah Walker and for the Williamson Free School of Mechanical Trades. Young is known locally as “the Marker Lady.” She is the author of “Women in Penn’s Woods: A History of Women in Pennsylvania.” She has written history articles for the Chester County Day newspaper since 2008.

Young is on the Board as Secretary of the Uwchlan Conservation Trust and is a member of various historical societies in Chester and Delaware counties. Young is also a member of the Business and Professional Women (PA and Delaware County Chapter) and the League of Women Voters (PA and Chester County Chapter).

She received a paralegal certificate from Pennsylvania State University and has worked for attorneys for over 30 years. She currently works part-time for a Delaware County law firm.

Joanie DiMartino

Treasurer

Joanie DiMartino is the Museum Curator and Site Superintendent of the Prudence Crandall Museum, a National Historic Landmark in Canterbury, Connecticut.  She earned an MA in Public History from Rutgers University, where her scholarly focus was the Progressive-Era militant suffrage movement.  She has been in the museum field for over 25 years, working at many different sites, from large institutions such as the Kentucky Historical Society and Mystic Seaport Museum, to small historic houses.  DiMartino serves on the Executive Committee of the Connecticut League of History Organizations (CLHO) Board, the Connecticut History Day Advisory Council, and is the Connecticut representative for the Votes for Women Trail through the National Collaborative of Women’s History Sites, which she represented on the Connecticut Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission.  She lives in Mystic, Connecticut with her family, and serves her community as a Justice of the Peace.

Andrea Malcomb

Andrea Malcomb is Director at Historic Denver’s Molly Brown House Museum. She is focused on elevating the house museum as a nationally recognized women’s history site while also expanding the museum’s education partnerships across Denver. Under her leadership, the museum has elevated its public history impact through programs and interpretation that superimpose feminized narratives of historical events onto contemporary place-based activities, prompting audiences to explore a new, woman-centered dynamic between past and present.

This has led to education curriculum that elevates diverse stories of place-making, establishes higher standards for collections care and accessibility, and generates programming for evolving audience needs. Malcomb has also ensured the historic house will stand for another century with the recent completion of $1million+ in capitol restoration and the addition of accessible programming spaces.

She has served on the NCWHS RIC since 2018 and is in a second term on the Historic House Museums Committee of AASLH. She enjoys reading, cooking, championing for women’s rights, sits on the Board of Irish Network CO, and volunteer’s with the League of Women Voters.

Cheryl Harned

Cheryl Harned is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A public historian, she works at the intersections of material culture, personal identities and the public lives of collected objects. Harned collaborates with students and community partners to develop, implement and evaluate exhibitions and programs that promote creativity, connection and self-reflection.

Among her accomplishments, she has served as Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Five Colleges, Inc. Graduate Fellow, assistant curator of the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum at Mount Holyoke College, exhibition activities developer at Historic Northampton, and consultant for a variety of museums and historical societies. In 2017, she served as technology director and program assistant for the NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops for School Teachers: Women Making Change. Harned’s scholarly research explores the roles of trauma, wonder and identity through individuals’ collections and their efforts to make those collections visible in public life.

Erica Ciallela

Jolene Rickard

Jolene Rickard is an Associate Professor at Cornell University in the departments of History of Art and Art, and the former Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program 2008-2020 (AIISP). She is a visual historian, artist and curator interested in the intersection of Indigenous art and post-neo-anticolonialism with an emphasis on Hodinöhsö:ni perspectives. A selection of publications includes: Diversifying Sovereignty and the Reception of Indigenous Art, Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017), Aesthetics, Violence and Indigeneity, Public 27, no. 54 (Winter 2016), Arts of Dispossession, in From Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic: Landscape Painting in the Americas, Art Gallery of Ontario (2015), The Emergence of Global Indigenous Art, Sakahán, National Gallery of Canada (2013), and Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors, The South Atlantic Quarterly: Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law, 110:2 (2011). Exhibitions include the Minneapolis Institute of Arts national exhibition, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, 2019-2021, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Art For a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950’s to Now, 2018-2020. She co-curated two of the four inaugural exhibitions of the National Museum of the American Indian (2004-2014). Her most recent curatorial intervention, Deskaheh à Genève, 1923-2023 : Défendre la souveraineté des Haudenosaunee / Deskaheh in Geneva, 1923-2023 : Defending Haudenosaunee Sovereignity (Geneva, Switzerland, 2023). Jolene is on the editorial board of American Art, a founding board member for the Otsego Institute for Native American Art and an advisor to GRASAC – The Great Lakes Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Culture. Jolene is from the Skarù·ręʔ / Tuscarora Nation, Hodinöhsö:ni Confederacy.

Katherine Jellison

Katherine Jellison is Professor of History and Director of the Central Region Humanities Center at Ohio University. Her books include Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963 (1993), It’s Our Day: America’s Love Affair with the White Wedding, 1945-2005 (2008), and (with Steven D. Reschly) Amish Women and the Great Depression (2023). She has written numerous journal articles and book chapters about topics ranging from the Civil War correspondence of a Massachusetts farm family to U.S. First Ladies. Her commentary on gender and politics appears frequently in such media outlets as the BBC, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

Lillian Serece Williams

Lillian Serece Williams, associate professor in the Department of Africana and American Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, is an expert on U.S. social and urban history. Her research is in the areas of institutions, ethnicity, biography and women’s history, and much of her scholarship has led to the preservation of the records of women and African Americans.

Professor Williams is the author of Strangers in the Land of Paradise: The Creation of an African American Community, Buffalo, New York, 1900-1940. Williams also published A Bridge to the Future: The History of Diversity in Girl Scouting. She is editor of the Records of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs and an associate editor of the 16 volume series Black Women in United States History. Williams has consulted on historical projects for
museums, corporations and nonprofit organizations, including the New York State Museum permanent exhibit “Black Capital: Harlem in the 1920s.” She also serves on several national and local commissions to celebrate the centennial of the ratification of the Suffrage amendment. Government agencies also have sought her advice regarding urban planning and public policy issues.

Williams is an expert on the history of African Americans in Western New York. Currently she is writing a biography on Mary Burnett Talbert, an early 20th century suffragist and human rights advocate who spent much of her life in Buffalo.

Photo Credit: Douglas Levere / University at Buffalo

Liz Almlie

Liz Almlie has worked for the South Dakota State Historical Society (State of South Dakota) as a Historic Preservation Specialist since March 2011, working with the programs of the National Register of Historic Places, Certified Local Government, survey, grants, markers, technical guidance, and education/outreach for a region of the state.  She received her B.A. in History at Augustana College (now University), Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 2008, and her M.A. in Public History at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, in 2010.

Almlie has written several articles on historic places and preservation for the South Dakota chapter of the American Institute of Architects, DOCOMOMO-US, and the quarterly journal South Dakota History, including “From the Capitol to Main Street: The Landscape of the Woman Suffrage Movement in South Dakota” (2019).  She also writes a blog independently called “History in South Dakota” with pages on the history of the suffrage movement, on South Dakota architects and builders, and a variety of posts on other state history topics she finds interesting.

Liz Witherspoon

Liz has experience as a people and business leader of entrepreneurial start-ups and traditional organizations on both coasts. Most recently she was the Managing Director for MITRE Corporation where she managed a portfolio of businesses. Prior to MITRE, Liz was a Vice President at Forrester Research where she managed the company’s Analyst Advisory and Total Economic Impact businesses. This included developing tools and methods to evaluate and communicate the value and impact of technologies for business customers. She began her career in telecom, e-commerce, and edtech startups in San Francisco and worked at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt prior to Forrester. Liz earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a master’s degree from the University of Michigan focused on postsecondary education and instructional technology. She is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Humanities at the University of Maryland Global Campus. Liz lives in Maryland with her husband Eric, three children and dog Spike. They can be found enjoying the wonderful parks Maryland has to offer and traveling to explore the country. Liz also enjoys playing clarinet in the NIH community orchestra.

Nancy Brown

Nancy Baird Brown grew up in Johnstown, New York, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born, married and inspired.  She is an original incorporator and founder of The Elizabeth Cady Stanton Hometown Association, and serves as its current co-chair.  She is the author of the “Walk in her Footsteps” cell phone tour, highlighting sites of importance in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s life in Johnstown. In addition to serving on the board of The National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites, Nancy is the Chair of The National Votes for Women Trail.

After a 20-year career as an advertising copywriter, Nancy became a fifth-grade teacher. Her passion for women’s history is a product of her undergraduate education at Simmons College – an all women’s college in Boston – and being the mother of three daughters and one granddaughter.

Paula F. Casey

Paula F. Casey of Memphis has dedicated more than 30 years educating the public about Tennessee’s pivotal role in the 19th Amendment’s ratification with a video, book, e-book, audiobook, and public art. She is also an engaging speaker on the 19th Amendment and voting rights.

She produced the video, “Generations: American Women Win the Vote,” in 1989 and the book, The Perfect 36: Tennessee Delivers Woman Suffrage, in 1998, and the e-book and audiobook in 2013. She helped place these suffrage monuments: bas relief plaque inside the State Capitol (1998); Tennessee Woman Suffrage Monument (Nashville’s Centennial Park 2016); Sue Shelton White statue (Jackson City Hall 2017). The Memphis Suffrage Monument “Equality Trailblazers” was installed at the University of Memphis law school after 5 years of work. The dedication ceremony was held on March 27, 2022, and is on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YTNND5F1aBw

She co-founded the Tennessee Woman Suffrage Heritage Trail (www.tnwomansuffrageheritagetrail.com) that highlights the monuments, markers, gravesites and suffrage-related sites. She is the new chair of the National Votes for Women Trail and is also the state coordinator for Tennessee.

Theresa McCarthy

Theresa McCarthy is an Onondaga nation, Beaver clan citizen of Six Nations of the Grand River Territory in Ontario. She is an Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies at SUNY-Buffalo. Theresa’s research interests focus on Haudenosaunee women, Haudenosaunee land rights and sovereignty, Haudenosaunee citizenship and Confederacy governance, and Haudenosaunee languages and intellectual traditions. She is the author of In Divided Unity: Haudenosaunee Reclamation at Grand River (UAP) which won the 2017 Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Best First Book Prize. Theresa previously worked on a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council- funded archival project that digitized and repatriated an extensive collection of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century ethnographic material collected from Six Nations community members. She also worked as a co-producer on an educational documentary about the 2006 Haudenosaunee land reclamation near Caledonia, Ontario. For these, and other contributions, Theresa is recognized as Associate Professor /Iakorihonnién:ni of Indigenous Research at Six Nations. 

Theresa is currently Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence in the College of Arts and Sciences at UB, and she is Director of UB Indigenous, a campus wide hub for Indigenous research, student, and community engagement. A longtime advocate for the revitalization of Indigenous languages, Theresa has worked on reinstating Haudenosaunee language courses at UB, and on building relationships with nearby Haudenosaunee communities in support of Indigenous language learning. She is currently a Principal Investigator and the Indigenous lead on a 3.2 million Mellon Foundation grant supporting the formation of the new Indigenous Studies Department at UB. Theresa is also Principal Investigator on a new Mellon Foundation sponsored project to establish digital Haudenosaunee Archive, Resource and Knowledge Collection. She is both grateful and proud to be living and working on Seneca Nation territory in what is now known as Buffalo, NY.