Rediscovering the stories of women whom history set aside as decorative, frivolous, and entirely one-dimensional. Turning the chandeliers upon the neglected, the misrepresented, the thoroughly misunderstood powerhouses of the Gilded Age, Late Victorian, and Edwardian eras.
I am a historian, author, and PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh specializing in the Gilded Age, Late Victorian, and Edwardian women history has rather carelessly filed under decorative. The quietly formidable, the largely overlooked, and the thoroughly fascinating women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
My research focuses on the interwoven themes of class, culture, and consumption: how the women of this period constructed identity, embraced the possibilities of mass media, wielded influence with considerable precision, and shaped the social world from within its most gilded rooms. My thesis, my book, and my ongoing doctoral research all begin from rather the same governing conviction that the most powerful woman in any room was invariably the one everyone assumed was merely decorating it.
I hold a Master of Arts in American History with a minor in Public History, awarded with high distinction, and a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude from the University of Colorado where I also won the inaugural Three Minute Thesis competition. I hold additional certificates in historic preservation, genealogical research, and antiques and appraising.
My first book, The Queen of Denver (2020), established me as the leading historian on the life of Louise Sneed Hill. I have published research with History Colorado, lectured to chapters of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution and the Colonial Dames of America — for whose 2020 Fall Benefit I had the honor of serving as keynote speaker — and presented at the University of Colorado's Rocky Mountain Interdisciplinary History Conference and Colorado Preservation Inc.’s Saving Places conference. I have written for the Colorado Encyclopedia and served as head editor of the University of Colorado's Historical Studies Journal.
There is also a rather personal dimension to all of this for the academic record, naturally, does not capture everything.
I connect with this research on a level that is, frankly, rather difficult to explain in purely academic terms and I have come to believe that this is precisely what shapes my perspective and makes the work worth doing. I am, in the most literal sense, a former debutante. I have stood in archives holding photographs of women whose names most people have forgotten. I have entered the rooms they built, wondering whether they are looking back and if so, how best to honor what they left behind.
These women and this particular history are easier to understand, I find, when one has worn the gloves. That is not a marketing statement. It is a deep recognition that these women were human beings — complex, contradictory, and utterly fascinating. All of them worth remembering. All of them, at last, painted in the full portrait they deserve.