Speakers

Laura J. Ping is an adjunct assistant professor with the Pace-Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History MA in American History Program and Queens College, City University of New York. Her article entitled “‘A Tale of Two Bloomer Costumes: What Mary Stickney’s and Meriva Carpenter’s Bloomers Reveal about Nineteenth Century Dress Reform” will be published in a forthcoming issue of Dress and Ping is currently writing a co-authored biography of education reformer Catherine Beecher, which is forthcoming from Routledge Press. Her current book manuscript, Beyond Bloomers: Fashioning Dress in Nineteenth Century America analyzes the cultural and political impact of women’s clothing during the long nineteenth-century (1789-1914). Ping has been awarded a 2020-2021 David Jaffe Fellowship in Visual and Material Culture from the American Antiquarian Society and a 2021-2022 Postdoctoral Research Award from the Library Company of Philadelphia. Laura holds a B.A. in History from the University of Iowa, M.A. in American History from Virginia Commonwealth University, PhD in American History with a minor in women's history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Bonnie Belshe is Social Studies Department Chair and teaches US history and AP US history at Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, CA. She has an MA in education from the University of San Francisco and an MA in history from San Jose State University. She was chosen as the California History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute in 2014. In 2017–2018, she was named one of six teacher fellows for Mount Vernon’s Lifeguard Teacher Fellowship. Belshe served on the Teacher Advisory Council for the National Humanities Center in 2018 and is currently on the Teacher Advisory Group for the National Council of History Education. When not teaching (or in shelter-in-place), she can be found at the beach, having fun with her niece and nephew, or watching Cardinals baseball.

Zara Anishanslin is Associate Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware. She previously taught at CUNY and at Columbia, where she co-chaired the Columbia Seminar in Early American History and Culture from 2011-16. Anishanslin received her PhD in the History of American Civilization at the University of Delaware in 2009, and has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the New-York Historical Society (2014-15) and a Patrick Henry Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins (2009-2010). Other fellowships include grants from the Omohundro Institute, The Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, Harvard Atlantic Seminar, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies. Her first book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016) was the Inaugural Winner of The Library Company of Philadelphia’s Biennial Book Prize in 2018 and a Finalist for the 2017 Best First Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians. She has been a frequent talking head on the Travel Channel show, “Mysteries at the Museum,” and served as Material Culture Consult for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2019 show, “Hamilton: The Exhibition.”

Anishanslin was the 2018 Mount Vernon Georgian Papers Programme Fellow, working at the Washington Library, the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, and King’s College London on her new project on the American Revolution, Under the King's Nose: Ex-pat Patriots in the American Revolution (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, under contract). The book also received fellowship support from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Department of History at Princeton University. From 2021-23, Anishanslin is a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellow, in partnership with Philadelphia's Museum of the American Revolution.

Carol Berkin is Presidential Professor of History Emerita at Baruch College & the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of several books, including First Generations: Women in Colonial America; A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution; Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence; Civil War Wives: the Life and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant; Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte; The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America’s Liberties; and most recently, A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism.

Berkin is a frequent contributor to PBS and History Channel television documentaries on early American and Revolutionary Era history and is often a panelist on programs at the New-York Historical Society. She is the editor of the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s online journal, History Now and has directed numerous summer institutes for Gilder Lehrman, Mt. Vernon, and the New-York Historical Society. She serves on the scholarly boards of The National Museum of Women’s History and the New-York Historical Society’s Center for American Women’s History. She is an elected member of The Society of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society.

Katherin Breitt Brown is Mount Vernon’s historic costumer and a lead interpreter on the farm. Rarely do you see her without a needle and thread in hand. She has been sewing nearly her entire life, but her academic credentials (an MFA in Creative Writing and a MA in Education, both from American University in Washington, DC) took her away from her love of garment construction until coming to Mount Vernon. The serendipitous opportunity to work at Mount Vernon constructing (and more often mending) 18^th century clothing was an unexpected mid-life career change that enabled Kathrin to delve into the amazing world of domestic and social history.

Kathleen M. Brown is the David Boies Professor of History, a faculty affiliate of Africana Studies and the History and Sociology of Science, and the lead historian on the Penn & Slavery Project. In 2021-2022 she will be the William Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, United Kingdom. Her scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Brown’s research interests center on intersectional questions of race, gender, sexuality, and labor in colonial North American, Atlantic, and early U.S. contexts. She is the author of two prize-winning books, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996) and Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (2009). She is currently completing a history of abolition, Undoing Slavery: Abolitionist Body Politics and the Argument over Humanity (forthcoming, University of Pennsylvania Press), that considers how the campaign to end slavery entangled activists in a complex process of undoing longstanding practices and habits of the body central to that institution. Undoing Slavery incorporates research in legal and medical history to provide a historical understanding of the human body at the center of debates about Black citizenship and the regulations of Black people’s movements, labor, and reproductive capacity.

Denver Brunsman is Associate Professor and Associate (Vice) Chair of the History Department at George Washington University, where his courses include “George Washington and His World,” taught annually at Mount Vernon. His book, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2013), received the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work in eighteenth-century studies in the Americas and Atlantic world. He is also a coauthor of a leading college and AP U.S. History textbook, Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People (2016; 2020) as well as the e-books, Leading Change: George Washington and Establishing the Presidency (2017) and George Washington and the Establishment of the Federal Government (2020). A retired Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserves, his honors include membership in 2014-15 fellow class at the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, induction into the George Washington University Academy of Distinguished Teachers (2016), and selection to the College Board AP U.S. History Development Committee (2018).

Caylin Carbonell is currently an NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture. She is a historian of gender, race, and power with a focus on the lived experiences of unfreedom in early New England. Her book project, Laboring Lives: Households, Dependence, and Power in Colonial New England uses innovative archival practices to reveal stories of the everyday lives of diverse New Englanders.

Adam T. Erby is Curator of Fine and Decorative Arts at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, where he oversees the institution’s fine and decorative arts collections, historic interiors, and special exhibitions. He led the curatorial restoration of George and Martha Washington’s Front Parlor, a five-year process of research and reconstruction that culminated in the space’s February 2019 reopening. He was the curator of the special exhibition Gardens & Groves: George Washington’s Landscape at Mount Vernon and the lead author of the corresponding book The General in the Garden: George Washington’s Landscape at Mount Vernon. His work has been published in The Magazine Antiques, Antiques & Fine Arts, and the Chipstone Foundation’s journal American Furniture. Erby holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. He is an alum of the Attingham Summer School. Erby serves on the Historic Furnishing’s Advisory Committee at Stratford Hall and as a board member of the Alexandria Association. He is currently at work on the reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection and the next several room restorations.

Lorri Glover is the John Francis Bannon Endowed Chair in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 1996. Her works include Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds Among the Early South Carolina Gentry (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America, with Daniel Blake Smith, (Henry Holt, 2008). With Craig Thompson Friend she edited Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South (University of Georgia Press, 2004); and Death and the American South (Cambridge University Press, 2014). In 2009, she joined the team of the textbook/reader Discovering the American Past: A Look at the Evidence (Cengage Learning), which is currently in its 8th edition and widely used in college classrooms across the nation. In 2014, she published Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries with Yale University Press. Her latest book, exploring the ratification debates in Virginia in 1787-88, is The Fate of the Revolution: Virginians Debate the Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Glover worked for many years on a Teaching American History team in East Tennessee, and she has served on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Southern History and the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.

David & Ginger Hildebrand specialize in researching, recording, and performing early American music. They concertize regularly, mostly in the eastern half of the country, also offering teacher workshops, children's programs and consulting on special projects. They have been a part of the George Washington Teacher Institute since it started in 1999 and have together presented over 65 times to attendees of this program. They founded the Colonial Music Institute in 1999 - an online compendium of research resources and teaching aids. In 2020 the Hildebrands donated the Colonial Music Institute to Mount Vernon, including all existing book and CD publications, rights to reprint, and intellectual property - you can see its new home by clicking here. The resources now permanently available there will be useful to you in following up to the "Music of Martha Washington's Time" presentation. Among other PBS soundtracks, the Hildebrands produced that for Rediscovering George Washington, based on Richard Brookhiser's book, Among their 7 CD recordings is "George Washington: Music of the First President," released in 1999. Ginger holds an M.M. in guitar performance from the Peabody Conservatory; David's M.A. and Ph.D., both in musicology, are from George Washington University and Catholic University. An author for Johns Hopkins University Press, David's book Musical Maryland: A History of Song and Performance from the Colonial Period to the Age of Radio was published in September, 2017. Ginger teaches privately at the Key School and Severn School, and David is on the faculty at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore.

Amanda Isaac serves as Associate Curator at George Washington’s Mount Vernon for the Historic Preservation and Collections Department. As Associate Curator, Isaac researches, curates, and interprets a collection that ranges from George and Martha Washington’s personal effects to the historical relics and commemorative objects that honor their legacy. She is currently leading the effort to create a comprehensive furnishing plan for Mount Vernon. Her publications include Take Note! George Washington the Reader (2013), and “Ann Flower’s Sketchbook: Drawing, Needlework, and Women’s Artistry in Colonial Philadelphia” (Winterthur Portfolio, 2007). Mrs. Isaac is a graduate of the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, where she studied art history and American history, and holds a master’s degree from the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in Early American Culture.

Elizabeth Keaney is a museum educator with experience in history, art, science, and encyclopedic museums from the D.C. region to Alaska. Having first worked at Mount Vernon beginning in 2004, she has taught in nearly every part of the Estate including the Pioneer Farm and Education Center. Beginning in 2006, she began an apprenticeship under Mary Wiseman, the former Artistic Director for Character Development at Colonial Williamsburg and portrayer of Martha Washington for more than twenty-five years. In 2009, Ms. Keaney earned her M.A.T. in Museum Education from The George Washington University and has created and facilitated teacher professional development programs at National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Anchorage Museum, and the Palm Springs Art Museum. She is thrilled to support teacher and student engagement with the lives of the Washingtons and those who lived and worked at Mount Vernon.

Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, PhD, specializes in Native American and Indigenous Studies, with a focus on Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her broader teaching and research interests include early American history, American Indian social and intellectual histories; settler colonialism, especially as it relates to legal and educational systems; conceptualizations of space, place, and land tenure in Indian Country; and public history.

Mt. Pleasant has presented her research at numerous scholarly conferences organized by the American Society for Ethnohistory, the American Studies Association, the Bershire Conference on the History of Women, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She has been invited to speak at historical societies, libraries, museums, high schools, and American Indian cultural resource organizations. In 2013 she was elected to a three-year term on the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. Mt. Pleasant enjoys consulting on museum exhibits and appreciates opportunities to share current scholarship with general audiences. She has been a guest on CNN and her work has been profiled in the New York Times and in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. Mt. Pleasant is currently an Assistant Professor of Native American Studies in the Department of Africana and American Studies at the University at Buffalo.

Dean Norton began employment at Mount Vernon Estate on June 23, 1969 and never left. After receiving a degree in horticulture from Clemson University, he began his horticultural career as the estates boxwood gardener. He was promoted to horticulturist in 1980 and is responsible for applying the latest plant science and management techniques of horticulture in a historic setting. For the past 49 years, Dean has devoted considerable time to researching 18th century gardens and gardening practices. He has received awards for

conservation from the DAR and the Garden Club of America. He is a screening committee for the Garden Conservancy, received the American Horticulture Societies Professional Award in 2006, is an honorary member of the Garden Club of Virginia and is a past president of the Southern Garden History Society. Dean serves on several historic property boards and lectures nationally and internationally.

Lynn Price Robbins holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in history from George Mason University and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is currently an Associate Producer and Lead Historical Researcher on an upcoming docuseries about George Washington. In addition, she serves as an Assistant Editor for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln. Robbins is the co-editor of George Washington's Barbados Diary: 1751-52 (2018) and The Papers of Martha Washington (July 2022) from UVA Press and has an essay on Martha Washington in the forthcoming book The Women of George Washington's World (June 2022), edited by George Boudreau and Charlene Boyer Lewis. Robbins has also worked on a variety of projects for the Papers of George Washington, including George Washington’s Financial Papers and the Bibliography Project. Her research includes colonial and U.S. history, focusing on the era of the American Revolution and the Early Republic, with an interest in women, slavery, manumission, and colonization.

Kathryn Silva is the Chair of the Department of Humanities and assistant professor of History at Claflin University, the oldest Historically Black College in South Carolina. Her teaching includes the role of race and gender in the United States and the World. Courses include Lowcountry in the Atlantic World, History of Women in the United States, African Kingdoms, and the History of Modern Africa. She has recently published, “Daughters and Sons of the Dust: The Challenges of Accuracy in African American Historical Film” The History Teacher, in the issue “Race in the United States, Part I: African Slave Trade,” (February 2018) and “African American Millhands, the Durham Hosiery Mills, and the Politics of Race and Gender in the Durham’s Textile Industry, 1903-1920” North Carolina Historical Review, Spring 2017. Her book manuscript in progress, “At Times We May Seem Bold:” African American Women in the Southern Textile Industry,” examines the role of women in the southern textile industry from slavery to Civil Rights. She served as co-lead writer and Program Director on a $500,000 three-year Andrew W. Mellon Grant awarded in December 2017 to aid Claflin in infusing workforce competencies in Humanities General Education courses. She holds a B.A. in History and Africana Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a Master's and Doctorate in History from the University of South Carolina.

David J. Silverman is Professor of History at George Washington University. He is the author of several books on Native American, colonial American, and American racial history, including This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and Troubled History of Thanksgiving (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Beknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019). He is the recent recipient of the William Hickling Prescott Award for Excellence in Historical Writing, given by the Massachusetts branch of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and the Daily Beast.

Samantha Snyder is the reference librarian at George Washington's Mount Vernon. At Mount Vernon, Samantha is in charge of managing and answering research inquiries, as well as overseeing collections development for the library’s modern books collection. She received her master's in history, with an emphasis on eighteenth century American history, from George Mason University. She received her master's in library and information studies, and her bachelor's of art in English literature from the University of Wisconsin. She studies the history of early American women, as well as the social and material culture of urban elites in the mid-Atlantic. She is working on a biography of Elizabeth Willing Powel, an influential eighteenth-century Philadelphia woman known for her political salons, and friendship with George Washington.

Debra Demers joined George Washington's Mount Vernon as the Teacher Learning Coordinator in April of 2022. She is a former GWTI alum and always aspired to join the team and live her passion for George and Martha Washington’s legacy at Mount Vernon. Her role is to support the Manager of Teacher Learning with logistics and communications for a variety of programs developed for K12 educators as part of the George Washington Teacher Institute. Debra is a retired Reading and Literacy Coach with many years of teaching in both New York and Virginia, including eight years at the university level at Buffalo State College and University of Buffalo. She holds a Ed.M. in Reading from the University of Buffalo and a B.A. in Psychology and Elementary Education from SUNY Potsdam.

Tramia Jackson is the Director of Learning at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Prior to joining the team at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Tramia served as the Senior Coordinator for the Science Research Mentoring Consortium at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The Consortium is made up of 23 institutions across New York City --zoos, museums, universities -- dedicated to providing mentored science research opportunities for high school students throughout NYC. Tramia joined AMNH from the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience where she managed From Brown v. Board to Ferguson, an innovative three-year program linking eleven museums and community partners to create dialogue-based public programs and train youth in activism around issues of race, mass incarceration and education equity in the context of civil rights. Tramia also served as the North American Network liaison, and provided direct services to over 100 museums, historic sites and archives. Before joining the Coalition, Tramia served as the Director of Education at the Fredericksburg Area Museum & Cultural Center in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She completed her MA in History Museum Studies at the Cooperstown Graduate Program at SUNY Oneonta and received her BA in History from The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Alissa Oginsky joined George Washington’s Mount Vernon as the Manager of Teacher Learning in the summer of 2018. In this role, Alissa is responsible for the creation, development, implementation, and evaluation of all George Washington Teacher Institute national programming and resources to ensure Mount Vernon’s mission is accessible to K12 teachers across the country. Alissa is a former classroom teacher of 11 years who has been recognized for her work by being named the 2018 Fairfax County Public Schools Secondary Teacher of the Year and the 2016 Mount Vernon History Teacher of the Year. She holds an M.A. in Art Museum and Gallery Education from Newcastle University, UK and a B.S. in Elementary Education from York College, PA.

Sadie Troy joined the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon in the fall of 2017. She serves as the Manager for Student Learning for the Education Department. In this position, her primary initiatives include ensuring Mount Vernon’s mission to schools and classrooms around the country addresses student learning needs through the creation, development, implementation, and evaluation of signature student learning experiences and contributing expertise and guidance to all student-facing work on the estate and online. She has a B.A. degree in Video Production from Webster University and a M.Ed. degree in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Virginia.

K. Allison Wickens, Vice President for Education, joined George Washington’s Mount Vernon in the summer of 2014. She currently leads the Education and Guest Services division and oversees the learning goals for the institution for onsite, offsite, and digital outreach programs. She represents Mount Vernon in national discussions about museums, historic sites and how they relate to history and civics education today.

Before arriving at Mount Vernon, she had been at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Postal Museum, serving as their Director or Education and Visitor Services. She received her Master’s Degree in History at the University of Colorado, Boulder where she got a certificate in Museum Studies. Between her undergraduate work at Grinnell College and graduate school, she lived and worked in Washington D.C. at a wide variety of Smithsonian museums and offices.