Michelle Williams
Scholarship
Michelle joined the Higher Education Program at the Indiana Women’s Prison in 2016. While enrolled in American History 100, she joined forces with Molly Whitted to tackle one of the most neglected parts of the Women’s Prison History Project: the girls who lived in the Reformatory. Michelle and Molly are both data wonks and poured themselves into the project, first digitizing all the information we had on hundreds of the girls and then analyzing it.
Their paper, Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of the Initial Cohort of Girls at the Indiana Reformatory Institution for Women and Girls, won honorable mention in a statewide competition for best undergraduate history paper in the state (beaten only by Christina Kovats’ paper on the origins of Indiana’s Magdalene Laundry). Molly and Michelle continued working on the project until they received the very rare honor as undergraduates of having their article “But I Only Wanted Them to Conform” selected for publication by a peer-reviewed academic journal.
The chapter on “Jennie” in Who Would Believe a Prisoner? combines their research on the girls at IWP with Kim Baldwin’s critique of the women who ran the reformatory and were profiting from the girls’ labor, “Counterfeit Decency,” that Kim presented to the American Historical Association in 2016.
Photographs by Brian Wright
Service Dog Training
Michelle also threw herself into the prison’s service dog training program. Here is a brief but endearing video clip of her speaking at the June 2018 “graduation” for the dogs and their new owners (Michelle is at the very beginning).
Theater and Dance
Michelle is a member of the prison’s liturgical dance team, Lifted, and participates in theater and dance productions whenever she can. When women at the prison performed The Duchess of Stringtown (authored by Michelle Daniel Jones and Anastazia Schmid), Michelle Williams played the role of the easily corrupted prosecutor (hence the goatee).
left to right: Jeneth (PeeWee) Hughes, Cindy White, Connie Bumgardner, Lisa Hotchstettler (partially hidden), Michelle Williams, Michelle Daniel Jones. Photo by Andy Spear.
left to right: Lisa Hochstetler, Lara Campbell, Michelle Daniel Jones, Irene Price, Cindy White, Heather Shaw, Natalie Medley, Michelle Williams,Shirwanda Boone, Nan Luckhart, Jeneth Hughes, Danielle Green, Connie Bumgardner. Photo by Andy Spear.
One of her most memorable performances (though you never see her face) is Michelle playing the shadow of addiction in a dance by her and Jessica Inholt Beyers in the IWP chapel. You can watch it here.