About the Founders

Dr. Jessica Millward

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

Resident Diva, Institutional Partnerships, Production, and Keeper of the Dissertation Clock.

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 is currently working on two other public facing digital projects. She is producing a forthcoming family history web series, titled “Sharing History with My Dug Up Dad.” With Tiffany Willoughby Herard and Johnanna Ferdandez, Millward curates, “Inside the Activist Studio: A Digital Repository for Movement Material.”

Ashley Achee

I’m a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, and cats.

Mother of Cats, Digital Content Curator, and Digital Historian

Ashley Achee received her Bachelor of Arts in History from Scripps College in Claremont, California. She is currently a graduate student in the history department at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests focus on gender, race, and crime in the turn-of-the-century West. Her dissertation, Criminal Motherhood: Virtuous Women and Dangerous Matriarchs in Colorado Courts, 1870-1940, follows the lives of five women who were convicted of crimes against motherhood - abortion, infanticide, and murder. Using trial records, newspaper editorials, coroner records, and literature, this thesis analyzes the shifting legal definitions of “good” motherhood with popular attitudes towards race, class, and sexuality.

In addition, Ashley is a teaching assistant for American history survey courses at the University of California, Irvine and is currently preparing to teach History of Sexuality in the United States in Summer 2019. She is also a founder and principal investigator for the Historians on Housewives Project.

Most importantly, Ashley is the mother to three beautiful cat-children: Sushi, Sapphire, and Souffle.

Kacey Calahane, Doctoral Candidate US History, UC Irvine

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

Ice Queen, Public Outreach, Event Planning

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.

Max Speare

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

Minister of Shade, Social Media, Research, and Production

Max Speare is a third-year doctoral candidate in the History Department at the University of California, Irvine. His areas of research and expertise are in U.S. and early American history, slavery, race, gender, empire, the American Revolution, colonial law and surveillance. His dissertation is entitled “Slavery, Surveillance, and Carceral Culture in Early New York, 1712-1799,” a historical narrative about power relations from enslaved New Yorkers’ perspectives. Using coroner inquests, travel narratives, diaries, letters, financial records, newspapers, and courtroom documents, Speare shows that enslavers and enslaved New Yorkers mapped power and privilege to control enslaved bodies and movement around the city and built rival community networks. In addition to doctoral research, Max Speare is a teaching assistant at the University of California, Irvine and adjunct faculty for Saddleback Community College. He teaches the US History survey as well as courses in early American and twentieth-century US history. He is also a co-founder of the Historians on Housewives Project.

In his spare time Max enjoys loudly playing bass, and taking naps with Ella the puppy and Maggie the cat. He is always excited for long wondering walks with Ella and his wife Kacey.