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.
Co-Secretary
Dr Rachell Sánchez-Rivera
Cambridge University
Rachell is a scholar from Cambridge University, and her interests lie in Eugenics, Racism, Reproductive Justice, Historical Sociology, Sociology of Health and Illness, Critical Race Theory, Disability Studies, Gender, and Queer/Cuír Theory. Her first book, What Happened to Mexican Eugenics: Racism and the Reproduction of the nation is currently under review with Cambridge University Press. Her current project focuses on The Cultural Politics of Reproduction in Latin America (alongside Dr. Rebecca Ogden, University of Kent). Rachell is a tech guru and plans to record some / all our seminar series and make them available on YouTube to further broaden our reach.
Treasurer
Dr Sinead McEneaney
Open University
Sinead completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, where she earned a PhD in History in 2004. She then taught at St Patrick’s College (Dublin City University) and NUI Maynooth before moving to the UK in 2007. Since then, she has taught US history at Newcastle University, the University of Essex, and spent almost nine years at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, where she was a Senior Lecturer in US History. She began working at the Open University in March 2019.
Early Career Representative
Dr Emma Day
University of Oxford
Emma is a historian of the twentieth century United States with a particular focus on the histories of sexuality, gender, race, and activism. Her first book, In Her Hands: Women Protesting the AIDS Epidemic in the United States, explores the interplay between women’s activism and state action in the context of the US AIDS epidemic, forthcoming with University of California Press. She is also working on a second project examining women’s activism against sexual assault in prison.
Postgraduate Representative
Genevieve Johnson-Smith
Newcastle University
Genevieve Johnson-Smith is a PhD candidate in the history department at Newcastle University, working on a project around 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.
Social Media and Website Editor
Gabrielle Tymków
University of Plymouth
Gabrielle studied 20th-century American history at the University of Plymouth, graduating with an MA in 2021.
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 