Since its founding in 2017, Sharing Stories from 1977: Putting the National Women’s Conference on the Map, a flagship project of the Center for Public History, has been a national trend setter in digital humanities. Their latest venture is no exception. 

In September 2025, the Sharing Stories project launched its inaugural Editorial Board. The members will hold a one-year term through July 2026. Much like the board of an academic journal or university press, this body will be a peer-review powerhouse. Nationally renowned faculty serving as lead reviewers will oversee competitively selected graduate fellows in a multilayered editing process of all digitally published scholarship.

Their efforts will enable publication of the biographies and demographic data over 3000 undergraduate and graduate student researchers conducted at UH and at colleges and universities nationally pertaining to 1977 National Women’s Conference participants. The project has provided a vehicle for talented undergraduate and graduate students to undertake public facing scholarship and build important career skills while studying a critical moment in American history.

This political convention was the first and only federally funded gathering in US history to determine what policies women needed from the federal government. Congress, in a bipartisan vote, funded the conference, and required delegates to represent racial, ethnic, religious, economic, and social class diversity in the United States, ensuring a conference that was more diverse than Congress was then or even is now. Hosted in Houston in November 1977, the NWC involved a total of over 200,000 participants in all. Delegates passed a multi-issue policy National Plan of Action delivered to President Jimmy Carter as The Spirit of Houston report.

The initial goal of the Editorial Board will be to quicken the publishing process so that the Sharing Stories project can get closer to their 50th Anniversary goal of publishing the biographies and demographic datasets of the nearly 2000 elected delegates who represented all US states and territories at the NWC. 

This goal will only be the beginning. The ambition of the Sharing Stories project is to capture and analyze thousands of participant stories—over 150,000 state and territorial planning meeting participants, and thousands more observers, torch relay runners, staff, volunteers, reporters, and international dignitaries are included. The Editorial Board, which will annually solicit top graduate students and faculty to serve, will be instrumental in achieving this corpus of scholarship available on the open-source Sharing Stories from 1977 site.

Twenty Sharing Stories Fellows were selected out of forty-eight applicants from outstanding Masters and Doctoral programs representing multiple disciplines across the United States and beyond. The 2025-2026 fellows are: Oluseyi Noah Adebanjo (University of Arkansas at Little Rock), Moira Armstrong (Rutgers University), Emma Bianco (University of California, Santa Barbara), Katie Blandford (Indiana University-Bloomington), Katie Burch (Carnegie Mellon University), Virgil Clark (Claremont Graduate University), Amber Edwards (Clemson University), Thalia Ertman (University of California, Los Angeles), Karolina Glasek (University College London), Amanda Huse (University of California, Santa Cruz), Rosalind King-Scoular (University of Memphis), Ruth Kramer (University of Virginia), Kathleen McHugh (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), Fallon Murphy (Boston University), Bernadette Mustacchio (University of South Florida), Laura Narvaez (Southern Methodist University), Miranda Ruzinsky (University of Houston), K. Stawasz (Rutgers University), Scherly Virgill (University of Maryland, College Park), and K Yin (Brown University).

Joining these fellows, are review leaders who have been selected for their past contributions to the Sharing Stories project and considerable expertise in editorial review. These are: Dr. Stacie Taranto (Ramapo College of New Jersey), Dr. Emily Westkaemper (James Madison University), and Dr. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (University of California, Irvine). 

Dr. Stacie Taranto is an associate professor of history at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where she has taught courses on post-1945 U.S. political and women’s history since 2010. Taranto holds an A.B. in history from Duke University (2001) and an A.M. (2005) and Ph.D. (2010) in history from Brown University. She is the author of Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). She also co-edited Suffrage at 100: Women and American Politics Since 1920 (Johns Hopkins Press, 2020). A public scholar, Taranto’s writing and commentary has appeared in Time, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. She is an associate editor of Made By History at Time (formerly at The Washington Post).

Dr. Emily Westkaemper is associate professor of history at James Madison University, where she teaches courses in U.S. history, U.S. women’s and gender history, and cultural history. She received a B.A. with highest distinction at the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in History and certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University. She is author of Selling Women’s History: Packaging Feminism in Twentieth-Century American Popular Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2017). Her current research analyzes twentieth-century U.S. popular culture’s depictions of women’s careers, as women employed in retail and media deployed popular culture to publicize women’s professional capabilities and to encourage women’s vocational aspirations. Westkaemper previously served as an editorial assistant for the Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Papers Project.

Dr. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is Chancellor’s Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She also serves as faculty director of the Humanities Center and Associate Dean in the School of Humanities of Research, Faculty Development, and Public Engagement. She received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from Stanford University and previously taught at Ohio State University. She authored Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: the Life of a Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, 2005), Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Cornell University Press, 2013), and with Gwendolyn Mink, Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress (New York University Press, 2022), winner of the 2023 Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Wu’s forthcoming book, Moving Mountains: Asian American and Pacific Islander Feminisms and the 1977 National Women’s Conference (University of Washington Press), focuses on Asian American and Pacific Islander Women at the NWC who subsequently organized their own regional and national conferences on Asian Pacific American women.

Dr. Nancy Beck Young and Dr. Leandra Zarnow, who co-direct the Sharing Stories project, will also mentor Sharing Stories fellows alongside Taranto, Westkaemper, and Wu. In addition, Dr. Peggy Lindner and Dr. Liz Rodwell, who direct the technology and user testing components of the Sharing Stories project will be offering further support, as will project manager, Dr. Sandra Davidson. For more on Sharing Stories, please check out: https://sharingstories1977.uh.edu