fbpx

Women’s History Month at Historic New England

Mar 12, 2023

During Women’s History Month we celebrate some of the women leaders on our staff who champion community preservation, lead efforts to recover stories from the past, engage the public at historic sites across the region, and educate students. Essentially, their work will be celebrated years from now during Women’s History Month.

With decades of combined experience, these leaders at Historic New England are helping to transform preservation into an essential tool supporting the livability of our communities. They can provide expert commentary on aligning preservation with sustainability, exploring a fuller history, sharing inclusive experiences and spaces, and making history accessible to all.

Carissa Demore. As Team Leader of Preservation Services, Demore provides strategic and operational oversight to Historic New England’s preservation outreach, advocacy, and community engagement activities. This includes directing the Preservation Easement Program; content development for the annual Historic New England Summit, the region’s largest conference about our collective roles in creating livable and resilient communities; directing Historic New England’s grant programs; advocacy related to the redevelopment of the Otis House in Boston’s West End and Beacon Hill neighborhood; and leading development of the Historic New England Center for Preservation and Collections in Haverhill, Massachusetts.  

Dr. Alissa Butler is a social historian whose research specialty is social groups and their in-group dynamics. She manages the Historic New England Study Center and oversees the research projects that support tours and programs, including Recovering New England’s Voices. Each year, she oversees more than a dozen academic researchers whose expertise includes LGBTQ+ history, Black history, Indigenous history, and women’s history.

She offers outreach to graduate programs to encourage careers in public history and museums. Butler is an advocate for moving the public history field toward the future through research and professional development training.

Melinda Huff is the Museum Operations Manager at Historic New England. She is responsible for ensuring the greatest possible public access to our thirty-eight historic sites. From the moment the visitor clicks into our website to purchase tickets or walks onto the property, she ensures that the visitor experience is the absolute best.

Huff works with an incredible team of site managers and museum guides who are committed to telling the stories of historically marginalized communities to create a fuller picture of the New England experience. She also leads the Accessibility Task Force at Historic New England.  

Carolin Collins is the Education Program Manager at Historic New England. She works with education coordinators and museum teachers across the region to develop and deliver innovative school and youth programs that are hands-on, interactive, immersive, grounded in history, and tied to the curriculum.

Collins is eloquent about engaging children in history and why that work in so important to building the next generation of history lovers.

Erica Lome is Associate Curator at Historic New England, where she oversees a collection of 125,000 objects related to domestic and everyday life in New England from the seventeenth-century to the present.

She is well versed on the collection and offers highlights on objects with compelling stories about women throughout history.

Lome is working with museum colleagues, community leaders, scholars, and advocates to build a more inclusive collection that tells the stories of diverse individuals, families, and communities from across the region.