Gwendolyn Lockman

Interests

20th Century U.S. West • Labor • Leisure • Class • Immigration • Urban Development • Land Use • Garden and Landscape Studies • Community Formation • Regional Identity • Women's and Gender Studies • Public History • Historic Preservation

Biography

Gwendolyn Lockman is a PhD candidate in United States History working with Dr. Erika Bsumek. Gwen is a historian of U.S. labor and leisure, with interests in dynamics of work, play, class, community, identity, race, gender, and culture in the 20^th century. Her dissertation research focuses on Butte, Montana’s Columbia Gardens Amusement Park from the 1870s to the 1970s, and the broader history of parks, recreation, and land use from the city's early development through the Superfund era (1983-present). The project focuses on parks as cultural places and spaces, but also uses this story as a lens into Butte’s political, economic, labor, ethnic, leisure, and environmental history. 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, the Huntington Library Short-Term Fellowship, the Kenneth Karmiole Fellowship for research at the William Andrews Clark Jr. Library at the University of California Los Angeles, and Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard University), where she is a 2022-2023 Junior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies, and where she participated in the 2021 Garden and Landscape Studies Graduate Workshop, part of the Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post. 

Gwen writes for Not Even Past and is an affiliate of the Center for Sports Communication and Media. She has contributed to the Made by History section of the Washington Post, and The Metropole, the blog of the Urban History Association (UHA). Gwen previously contributed to the UT History department as a web news assistant, social media manager, History Graduate Student Council representative, co-coordinator for the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality, and a Supplemental Instruction Leader. In 2019, she was a curation and interpretation intern for the Missoula, MT Historic Preservation Office at the Moon-Randolph Homestead and a UT Austin Summer Fellow for the Texas State Historical Society's Handbook of Texas Women.

Gwen earned her M.A. in History at UT in 2020. Her master's report is titled "Miners and Musicians: Rethinking Company Towns Through the Butte Mines Band, 1887-1953." She earned a portfolio in Women's and Gender Studies. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Georgetown University in 2016 with a B.A. in American Studies and minors in History and Government. Before graduate school, Gwen worked in the legal department for the Washington Nationals. 

Gwen is originally from Poplar, Montana, and calls Missoula, Montana home.