
07/01/2025
Let’s give a warm welcome to our 2025-26 Totman fellows: Emma O’Neill-Dietel and Morgan Forde. 👏
🌈 Emma O’Neill-Dietel, a Master’s student in History at UMass Amherst, explores the experiences of women federal workers in DC during the Lavender Scare of the 1950s. While much of the existing scholarship focuses on white gay men, Emma highlights how gender, race, and sexuality uniquely shaped women’s access to jobs, housing, and community. Drawing on resources from the DC History Center and her work with the , she examines the vital role of women workers’ leadership in the LGBTQ+ movement through a labor studies lens. Emma first shared her research at the 2024 DC History Conference with her poster, “Signs of Pride: Deaf LGBTQ+ Activism in DC.”
🪧 Morgan Forde, a doctoral candidate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, is researching Resurrection City, the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign encampment, as both an architectural experiment and a form of civil rights activism. Her dissertation explores how the six-week community on the National Mall challenged ideas of urban space and sovereignty. At the Kiplinger Library, she’ll focus on its ties to DC’s urban renewal. Morgan debuted this research at the 2023 DC History Conference with her paper, “Plywood Dreams.”
About the Totman Fellowships
The Totman Fellowships, made possible by generous donor support, provide stipends, resources, and mentorship to support new public-facing research on Black Washington and LGBTQ+ DC. Following summer research, fellows submit a fall project proposal and continue working with the DC History Center throughout the academic year, culminating in a final deliverable such as an article, conference presentation, or public program.
🔗 Learn more about our 2025-26 fellows in our recent blog post: https://dchistory.org/news-and-insights/meet-our-2025-2026-totman-fellows/
📸 2025-26 Totman fellows, Emma O’Neill-Dietel and Morgan Forde, at the DC History Center. Photo by Anne McDonough.