Meet the Mellon Fellows: Dr. Caitlyn Jones

Dr. Caitlyn Jones

University of Houston
PhD, History

Host Site: Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument
Fellowship Title: Including All Women in the Sequel: The History and Legacy of the National Woman’s Party
Project Description: Dr. Jones will research the newly acquired National Woman’s Party collection and, along with recent scholarship, help prepare the site for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Using this research, Dr. Jones will provide recommendations for redesigned exhibit space that invites visitors to engage with complex, nuanced stories about the fight for woman suffrage and the ongoing struggle for social, political, and economic equality.

Bio:

Caitlyn Jones is a public historian working in the fields of women's history, political history, and memory studies. She received her PhD in history and her master’s in public history at the University of Houston. Her dissertation focused on the 1977 National Women’s Conference and analyzes the event through the lens of public memory, arguing that the “national forgetting” of this moment speaks to a larger silence of women’s history in public spaces and the complex struggle in crafting a gendered public memory in the late twentieth century.

Previously, Caitlyn worked as the lead research assistant for the feminist digital humanities project Sharing Stories from 1977, an assistant editor for Houston History magazine, a podcast producer for Public Historians at Work, a preservationist for the City of Houston, and an editorial assistant at the National Museum of American History.

Tell us about your research interests!

My primary interest is uncovering how history is made, particularly how different organizations, communities, and movements craft historical narratives and how these stories relate to narratives put forth by institutions. My work has centered on twentieth-century feminist movements, where I analyze how leaders used tools such as historical preservation, archiving, oral history, and mass media to shape their own histories and frame gender equality as a fundamental American ideal. I am also interested in how place shapes communities and social movements, which has informed my practice as a public historian in Houston. Over the last seven years, I have worked with community members to create landmark applications, podcasts, roundtable events, oral history projects, and websites that detail the undertold stories of Black, Hispanic, women's liberation, and LGBTQ civil rights movements in the city.

What are you most excited about as you begin your fellowship?

I am most excited to transform my research into practice with this fellowship. I have studied how feminist activists worked with various stakeholders in the past to try to make their story part of our larger national history. Now, I get to take part in that work firsthand as a fellow at Belmont-Paul! There, I hope to collaborate with activists, descendants, and other history-makers to shape a more complex history about the long women's rights movement. At a time when Americans are looking to the past to understand the present, I want to help Belmont-Paul tell a more inclusive story by highlighting the activism of women of color, women with disabilities, and queer people while also facilitating honest conversations about the divides in race, class, ability, and sexuality that influence the ongoing struggle for gender equality.

Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

This project was made possible through the National Park Service by a grant from the National Park Foundation through generous support from the Mellon Foundation. The Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship program is administered through a partnership between NPS, NPF, and American Conservation Experience.