Chair
Dr Olivia Wright
Leeds Beckett University
Olivia is an interdisciplinary scholar of the United States based at Leeds Beckett University. Her research explores how different communities have historically used cultural tools and artistic expression to navigate and theorize various manifestations of confinement—both physical sites, such as prisons, psychiatric facilities and reformatory schools, and the various racial, gendered, and socioeconomic confinements that impact upon society more broadly. Her current book project, Caged Sister: Women’s Prison Zines in the United States, is the first study to collect, analyse, and theorise the long history of collective writing from women’s prisons, and is grounded in an analysis of over fifty different publications and nearly 1,000 individual issues gathered through original archival research.
Co-Secretary
Dr Hélène Charlery
University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès
Hélène specializes in American Studies and Film and Television Studies. More specifically, her recent research has focused on contemporary black women filmmakers, aesthetics, and distribution strategies. Her research is grounded on the theoretical background developed by the black feminist scholarship. Hélène brings a wealth of experience to the role and will help expand SHAW’s reach into Europe and help to cultivate existing and new connections.
Treasurer
Dr Rachell Sánchez-Rivera
Cambridge University
Currently, I am an LSE Fellow in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). My research bridges gender studies, history of science and medicine, and sociological theory,offering a diverse array of transnational perspectives on the critical studies of eugenics and ‘race’ science.
Early Career Representative
Dr Genevieve Johnson
Newcastle University
Genevieve Johnson recently completed her PhD thesis in the history department at Newcastle University, entitled “The Legacy of Moses Roper: Black Anti-Slavery Activism and Anti-Slavery Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Wales,”which researched fugitive abolitionism, emancipatory activism and anti-slavery radicalism in the UK, particularly Wales. She has carried out extensive research on forced and coerced Indigenous sterilisation and remains dedicated to this very important work. She contributed a chapter to the collective Sacred Bundles Unborn (2021) and has also contributed her research and writing to the BBC history/comedy podcast You’re Dead To Me. Her article, “‘No Country, No People, Ever Pleased Me So Much’: Black Activists in Wales and Welsh Anti-Slavery Activism in the Nineteenth-Century,” was recently published in the journal Slavery & Abolition. She is an Associate Lecturer at Newcastle University.
Postgraduate Representative
Louise Dobson
University of Sussex
Louise is a PhD candidate in American Literary History at Sussex University, (following an MSc from Columbia University). Her academic background includes journalism and teaching American Studies at high schools in the U.S. Her thesis is a feminist recoveryproject which argues that Janet Flanner, a queer journalist who wrote for the New Yorker magazine, developed a style of writing that closely aligns with New Journalism, a genre attributed to a male-dominated canon over a decade later. Louise is a recipient of an AHRC/CHASE studentship award.
Postgraduate Representative
Silvia Guselli
University of Rome
Silvia Guselli is enrolled in the second year of the Ph.D. Course in “Studies in English Literature,
Language and Translation-Curriculum in American Literature” at La Sapienza, University of Rome.
In 2022 she obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Goldsmiths College, University
of London. In 2024 she obtained a Masters Degree in English and Anglo-American Studies at La
Sapienza. Her doctoral project aims to explore the backcountry through Hector St John de
Crèvecoeur’s 1801 understudied work, Voyage dans le Haute Pensylvanie et dans l’ètat de New
York. Her interests are: the Eighteenth Century Frontier; the Appalachian Region and the whole of
Crèvecoeur’s oeuvre.
Social Media and Website Editor
Natasha Alexander
York St John University
Natasha Alexander graduated from York St John University with an MRes in Art History and Cultural Theory in 2025. Her research is interdisciplinary with a strong focus on the political applications of dealing with grief as a collective through art practice. Her Masters by Research thesis was awarded the Henry Moore Institute’s MA dissertation prize and was concerned with the artistic practice of Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo and its embodiment of loss in the aftermath of La Violencia. She has experience working for digital based companies and intends to use these skills to increase SHAW’s social media presence and outreach.
Officer without portfolio
Prof Kate Dossett
University of Leeds
Kate is an award-winning historian of the twentieth century United States with broad interests in cultural and political history and specializations in African American History, Gender histories and histories of the African Diaspora. She has been teaching and researching African American cultural history for twenty years and has published widely on Black Theatre, the Harlem Renaissance, Black Feminism and the history of the archive.
Society for the History of Women in the Americas 