Kacey Calahane

CEO/CFO, Public Outreach, Event Planning

Faculty at Saddleback Community College

Ph.D. Candidate at University of California, Irvine

“I’m not just writing history. I am making it.”

Kacey Calahane received her Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her Master’s in History from San Francisco State University, and she is currently a doctoral candidate in History at the University of California, Irvine. Her intellectual interests combine gender and women’s history and social movement studies with histories of institutions in the twentieth-century United States. Her dissertation, The General and Her Soldiers: How Phyllis Schlafly and Eagle Forum Mobilized the Conservative Movement, examines how conservative anti-feminists erected new institutions to network grassroots activists to business leaders and politicians in order to influence conservative Republican policy making in the United States since the 1970s. Kacey is an adjunct faculty member at Saddleback College lecturing in United States, African American, and Women’s History. Kacey is also an editorial assistant for the journal Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 published by Alexandria Street Press, and a co-founder of the Historians on Housewives Project.

In her spare time Kacey can be found figure skating or singing and dancing with the Harborlites women’s barbershop chorus. In 2019 Kacey was honored to become the Historian for Region 21 of Sweet Adelines International, and she has been kept busy tracking down photos, memorabilia, and stories of the almost 50 year history of organized women’s barbershop singing in the southwest. Kacey loves to spend time with her family; Max and Kacey have a cat, Maggie, and a puppy, Ella.

Dr. Jessica Millward

Chief Operations Officer,  Family History Expert, Keeper of the Dissertation Clock

Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine

“I have the brain of a historian and the clapback of a comedian!”

Professor Jessica Millward is the Black Thriving Inclusive Excellence Term Chair and an Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at UC Irvine. Dr. Millward's first book, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black women in Maryland was published as part of the Race in the Atlantic World series, Athens: University of Georgia Press (2015). An award winning scholar, she has published in the Journal of African American History, the Journal of Women’s History, Frontiers, Souls and the Women’s History Review as well as Op-eds in Chronicle of Higher Education, The Feministwire.com and The Conversation.com. Millward is currently working on a book length project that discusses African American women's experiences with sexual assault and intimate partner violence in the late 19th century.

An out of the box thinker, celebrity news expert, and a media savvy historian, Millward brings a historical perspective to modern day situations. In addition to the Historians on Housewives project, Millward curates, Activist Studio West: A Digital Repository of the Black Freedom Struggle Worldwide

Dr. Millward is the founder and Chief Consultant our Family History division.  Raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormon), Millward was trained to be a genealogist at an early age.   Later, as professional historian, Millward became frustrated to hear genealogists and librarians inform patrons that finding their roots in slavery was impossible.   Knowing this was not true, she conceived of this service to assist African Americans who feel their ancestors are lost to the slave trade.  Millward’s vision of a boutique family history service finds a great home within Historians on Housewives as our podcasts and outreach initiatives focus on teaching with Bravo TV. This includes teaching a broad range of individuals how to research their own family’s history. 

Max Speare

Creative Director, Social Media, Research and Production

Faculty at Saddleback Community College

Ph.D. Candidate at University of California, Irvine

“You better come with sources, because I always check footnotes.”

Max Speare is a doctoral candidate and a Mellon-Sawyer Fellow in the History Department at the University of California, Irvine. His areas of research and expertise are in US and colonial American history, slavery, empire, and law. His dissertation, entitled “Slavery, Surveillance and Carceral Culture in Early New York,” looks at the ways that enslaved New Yorkers and slaveholding New Yorkers mapped alternative routes of power around the city through rival communities. Additionally, Speare also teaches courses on US history at Saddleback Community College.