Gwendolyn R. Lockman holds a PhD in U.S. History from the University of Texas at Austin. She strives to make history accessible to the general public, students, and academics through a commitment to storytelling, teaching, and rigorous research. She has worked in local historic preservation, classrooms in both public and private institutions, and has written for public and academic audiences in the Washington Post, The Metropole (Urban History Association) and Not Even Past (UT Austin). She currently works as a Senior Exhibition Developer and Historian at the History Colorado Center, the flagship museum of the State of Colorado organized under the Colorado Department of Higher Education.
*Any views expressed here do not represent Gwen’s employer or its affiliates. This website represents her portfolio of work beyond the scope of her role with the State of Colorado.*
Gwen is a historian of United States labor and leisure, with interests in dynamics of work, play, class, community, identity, race, and culture since Reconstruction (1877 to present). Her dissertation advisor was Dr. Erika Bsumek. At UT, she wrote for Not Even Past, was an affiliate of the Center for Sports Communication and Media, and a Women’s and Gender Studies portfolio student. She contributed to the department as a Co-coordinator for the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality, Social Media Manager, History Graduate Student Council Representative, Social Media Manager, and Web News Assistant. Gwen worked for the City of Missoula in Summer 2019 as a curation and interpretation intern at the Moon-Randolph Homestead. She was the vice-chair of the Graduate Student Caucus of the Western History Association from 2022-2023.
Gwen’s book project is about Butte, Montana’s evolving uses of land within the city as the community contended with population and industry growth. Gwen turns our attention to the tensions between prioritizing an extractive resource industry and creating spaces for culture, leisure, and recreation. This project profiles the re-use of mining property for public green space dating to 1882, and the politics and perils that come with this method of remediation in the modern environmental era. Butte’s history is emblematic of major themes in the history of the American West, deeply tied to politics, extractive resources, natural environment, immigration, and identity. Her work is supported by the Friends of the Butte Archives Carrie Johnson Fellowship, the Charles Redd Fellowship in Western American History, the Mining History Association Research Grant, and Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard), through the Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies, Garden and Landscape Studies Graduate Workshop, and a junior fellowship in Garden and Landscape Studies. Most recently, Gwen participated in both the Summer Workshop in Applied History and the Skills Repurposing Workshop for PhDs at the Applied History Initiative at the University of Colorado – Boulder.
Before graduate school, Gwen worked in the legal department for the Washington Nationals Baseball Club Major League Baseball team. At the Nationals, she worked directly with in-house and outside counsel, the Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy Board of Directors, and the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball. Her significant projects included annual preparation of Capital Improvements at Nationals Park and serving as an office manager for the MLB Event Operations Headquarters during the 2018 MLB All-Star Game. She began volunteering at the Youth Baseball Academy as a mentor while in college and continued to do so until she left the Nationals.
Gwen graduated Magna Cum Laude from Georgetown University in 2016 with a degree in American Studies and minors in History and Government. Her undergraduate thesis, Overthrown: Curt Flood, Jim Bouton, and Baseball’s Free Agency Revolution, examined racism and labor relations in Major League Baseball through the cultural impact of the Civil Rights Movement, athlete activism, collective bargaining, player memoirs, and media on the advent of free agency. Her advisor for the project was Dr. Michael Kazin.
Gwen has worked in student affairs, residential living, university admissions, and has taught English as a Second Language. She has played saxophone for 20 years, though not with much frequency since her Georgetown Pep Band days, when you may have seen her cheering from the sidelines of a Hoyas basketball game.
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Gwendolyn R. Lockman, PhD 