Historic Northampton Appoints New Co-Executive Directors

The Board of Trustees of Historic Northampton announced the appointment of Laurie Sanders and Elizabeth Sharpe as Co-Executive Directors, starting May 1, 2016.  The experience and expertise of both offer a powerful combination of talents, ideas and connections for this next phase of the museum’s development.

PictureLaurie Sanders
Laurie Sanders is a naturalist, writer and the former host of Field Notes, a weekly natural history series that aired on WFCR for a decade. In 2014 she completed an ecological assessment of all of Northampton’s city-owned conservation areas, which include more than 30 properties and over 2,500 acres. She has prepared similar assessments for private clients, working not only in Massachusetts, but also in Idaho and the Adirondacks. She first came to Northampton in 1983 as a Smith College student and now lives in Westhampton with her husband and daughter. 

This past fall she gave a six-part lecture series, Rediscovering Northampton: Local History Viewed Through An Ecological Lens.  She offered the series to attract new members for Historic Northampton to meet a $25,000 membership challenge grant.  The series was a success, generating great enthusiasm about the subject, and a significant jump in membership and donations.  She brings a wealth of fundraising and programming experience to the position, writing grants for her own work and as co-chair of the private capital campaign for the Westhampton Public Library.

 PictureElizabeth Sharpe
Elizabeth Sharpe is an historian, writer, educator and museum consultant who lives in Amherst.  She is the author of In the Shadow of the Dam: The Aftermath of the Mill River Flood of 1874.  She has family roots in this area which sparked her research on Connecticut Valley history, architecture, history of technology and material culture for her PhD in History from the University of Delaware.

She is the former director of education at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.  Since she moved back to the Connecticut Valley, she has consulted for museums, written the history of the Mill River Flood, taught history and public history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and at Greenfield Community College in person and online.  Most recently she has taught Social Responsibility in Museums at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  She has been board president of the Amherst Historical Society and the Swift River Historical Society.