George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Hope McCaffrey joins the Richards Center for the 2025-2026 academic year as the Assistant Program Director. She also holds an appointment as Assistant Research Professor in the Department of History at Penn State. Dr. McCaffrey was previously a predoctoral fellow at the Richards Center in 2024-2025 and earned her Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University in 2025. She is a historian of gender and politics in the nineteenth-century United States, and her current book project focuses on white women’s partisan activism in the Democratic Party during the antebellum and Civil War eras. Her research has been supported by the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the New York Public Library, and the American Association of University Women.