Click here to download my CV: Ella Wagner CV Spring 2024

I am a public historian based in the Washington, DC metro area. I hold a PhD in US History and Public History from Loyola University Chicago and a BA from Columbia University in American Studies and History. My dissertation, completed in 2022, explores the race and gender politics of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and its efforts to become the first truly national women’s reform organization in the decades after the American Civil War. You can read it here. An essay adapted from this chapter will appear in the forthcoming interdisciplinary volume Reassessing the White Ribbon Army: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union After 150 Years (University Press of Kansas, 2025).

My interests and experience cover a broad range of topics in the American past. I currently research, preserve, and share the history of public transportation and urban space as Historian/Archivist for the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). From 2020-2023, I worked for the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education in the National Park Service, researching and writing engaging web content for NPS.gov and providing scholarly expertise in women’s history to NPS colleagues and leadership.

Much of my public history work focuses on making women’s history visible. In 2019, I curated an online exhibition for the Center for Women’s History and Leadership in Evanston, IL on the public confrontation between WCTU president Frances Willard and journalist and activist Ida B. Wells over the issue of lynching. Entitled “Truth-Telling: Frances Willard and Ida B. Wells,” the project also explores how issues of racism continue to reverberate within women’s movements. The National Council on Public History recognized the exhibit with an Honorable Mention in the category of “Outstanding Public History Project” for 2020.

In the past I have worked on the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites’s National Votes for Women Trail project, which aims to map suffrage history sites across the United States; on public programs for the Newberry Library; on suffrage history research for the Evanston History Center; as an architectural boat tour guide for Wendella Boats; and as a program assistant for the Social Science Research Council’s Digital Culture program. I live with my family in Silver Spring, MD.