About Me

Gwendolyn R. Lockman is a PhD candidate in U.S. History at 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 and Not Even Past. Her dissertation is titled, “Greening a Copper City: Parks, Mining, and Community in Butte, MT, 1879-2020.” She is currently a Junior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.

Gwen earned her M.A. in History at UT Austin in December 2020. She is a historian of United States labor and leisure, with interests in dynamics of work, play, class, community, identity, race, and culture during the 20th century. Her dissertation advisor is Dr. Erika Bsumek. At UT, she writes for Not Even Past, is an affiliate of the Center for Sports Communication and Media, and a Women’s and Gender Studies portfolio student. She previously contributed to the department as a Co-coordinator for the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality, Social Media Manager, History Graduate Student Council Representative, 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 is the vice-chair of the Graduate Student Caucus of the Western History Association.

Gwen’s dissertation project is about Butte, Montana’s evolving uses of land within the city as the community contended with population and industry growth, with attention to the tensions between prioritizing an extractive resource industry while creating spaces for culture, leisure, and recreation. This dissertation profiles the re-use of mining property for public green space, and the politics and perils that come with this method of remediation. 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) and the Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies through the Garden and Landscape Studies Graduate Workshop.

View my UT Austin profile here.

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.