In 2011, NWHM convened three meetings with scholars from across the country for guidance on Phase I of the Museum’s interpretive plan for the physical building. The scholars were invited based on a wide-range of expertise in women’s history and their ethnic and geographical diversity. Meetings were conducted by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a world-renowned museum program design firm, and held in Washington, DC, Raleigh, NC at Duke University and at the University of California at Irvine.

From those meetings, two committees are being established as of January 2012. The Scholars Advisory Council (SAC) will meet routinely with NWHM to provide guidance on current and future programming. The National Scholars Council members have offered to be available as needed. Below are members of the SAC and NSC for 2012-2013.

Scholars Advisory Council (SAC)
1. Professor Bonnie Morris (George Washington University)
2. Professor Dolores Hayden (Yale University)
3. Professor Stephanie Camp (University of Washington)
4. Professor Catherine Allgor (University of California- Riverside)
5. Professor Sonya Michel (University of Maryland)

National Scholars Council (NSC)
1. Professor Teresa Murphy (George Washington University)
2. Professor Jennifer Thigpen (Washington State University)
3. Professor Stephanie Cole (University of Texas- Arlington)
4. Professor Juliana Barr (University of Florida)
5. Professor Marjorie Spruill (University of South Carolina)
6. Professor Eileen Boris (University of California- Santa Barbara)
7. Professor Kathryn K. Sklar (SUNY-Binghamton)
8. Professor Jean Pfaelzer (University of Delaware)

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in partnership with NWHM offers monthly lectures on women's history. The following scholars have participated:
1. Dr. Kathleen Brown (University of Pennsylvania)
2. Professor Dolores Hayden (Yale University)
3. Dr. Thavolia Glymph (Duke University)
4. Dr. Linda Gordon (New York University)
5. Dr. Vicki Ruiz (UC Irvine)
6. Dr. Marjorie Spruill (University of South Carolina)
7. Dr. Deborah Willis (New York University)

The following historians have worked with NWHM to curate Online Exhibits:
1. Dr. Ida E. Jones- Howard University
2. Daile Kaplan (NYU, Swann Auction Galleries, author) and Donna Henes (author and artist) - Kaplan-Henes Photographs Collection
3. Dr. Alison Landsberg –George Mason University
4. Edith P. Mayo, Curator Emeritus, Smithsonian American History Museum
5. Linda McCarthy, Curator
6. Sonya Michel (University of Maryland)
7. Dr. Jean Pfaelzer – University of Delaware
8. Jeanne Schramm, Collector, Librarian and Co-Founder of the Mobile Women’s History Museum
9. Doris Weatherford, Historian and Author

Anne Firor Scott, a pioneer historian of American women, is W. K. Boyd Professor Emerita of History at Duke University. Professor Scott holds the distinction of being the first woman to chair the Duke history department, yet she also stands as the first professor at Duke to include women's scholarship in her teaching and research. Her book The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930, published in 1970, virtually established the modern study of southern women's history, and it has never gone out of print. It was one of the first studies in what come to be called "the new women's history," and the first to be based on close study of women's personal documents. Anne Scott is also the author of Making the Invisible Woman Visible, Unheard Voices: The First Historians of Southern Women, and Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of Letters in Black and White.

Bonnie J. Morris earned her Ph.D. in women’s history from the State University of New York at Binghamton. As a visiting research associate at Harvard Divinity School, Morris taught Harvard’s first graduate seminar on Hasidic women in America, and later published her doctoral dissertation as Lubavitcher Women in America. She has taught women’s studies at both George Washington University and Georgetown since 1994, including a term aboard ship for the global voyage Semester at Sea. She is the author of five other books, and her essays and articles have appeared in more than forty anthologies. Her research interests include the culture of the women's music movement since the mid-1970s, Jewish women's identity, women's sports, and other female communities. She is the author of Revenge of the Women’s Studies Professor, Eden Built By Eves: The Culture of Women’s Music Festivals, and Girl Reel.

Dolores Hayden, Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University, is the author of three notable works that explore American women’s history in the context of the spatial organization of everyday life: The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities; Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life; and The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. ). She uses the processes of land development, design, and construction to illuminate broad political controversies about women’s paid and unpaid labor, women’s private and public lives, and women’s aspirations for equal access to the city. Educated at Mount Holyoke College, Cambridge University, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Hayden is an urban historian and architect, and she served as president of the Urban History Association in 2010.

Stephanie Camp is Dio Richardson Endowed Professor at the University of Washington. Selected as a “Top Young Historian” by the History News Network in January 2008, she received her Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Camp earned a master’s degree in African American Studies from Yale and a bachelor of arts in French literature and culture from Penn. Camp is the author of Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. She is also the editor with Edward E. Baptist New Studies in the History of American Slavery. Camp is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews.

After a career in the theatre, Catherine Allgor attended Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA, as a Frances Perkins Scholar and graduated summa cum laude in History. She received her Ph.D. with distinction from Yale University, where she also won the Yale Teaching Award. Her dissertation on women and politics in early Washington garnered prizes both for the best dissertation in American history at Yale and for the best dissertation in U.S. Women's history in the country. Professor Allgor's book, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington City Help Build a City and a Government, published by the University of Virginia Press won the prize for the best first book by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Professor Allgor has also written on politics, women, and religion for national publications, and her newest project is a political biography of Dolley Madison.

Sonya Michel is a professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park, is a founding co-editor of the journal Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society. She has also taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Chicago, and at Princeton and Harvard. From 2009-11, she served as Director of United States Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where she is currently a Senior Scholar. Her publications include Children's Interests / Mothers' Rights: The Shaping of America's Child Care Policy; Civil Society and Gender Justice: Historical andComparative Perspectives; Child Care at the Crossroads: Gender and Welfare State Restructuring; Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States; and Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars . She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute and the Wilson Center, among others. Her current research includes a study of pension inequities in the United States; and a collaborative project on women, migration, and the work of care in global perspective.

Teresa Murphy is Associate Professor of American Studies and former chair of the department of American Studies at George Washington University. She is the author of Ten Hours Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Antebellum New England. She is currently completing a textbook on U.S. Women’s History as well as working on a scholarly monograph analyzing the evolution of writing about women’s history during the nineteenth century.

Jennifer Thigpen earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Washington State University. She is the author of “Something Wonderful is About to Happen': Americans and the Open Frontier" and "Looking 'West'--Perspectives on a Changing Nation, HOT Themes in American History Humanities Out There.”

Associate Professor Juliana Barr received her M.A. and Ph.D. (1999) in American women's history from the University of Wisconsin Madison and her B.A. (1988) from the University of Texas at Austin. She joined the University of Florida's Department of History in 2004 after teaching four years at Rutgers University and one year as a postdoctoral fellow at the William P. Clement Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. She specializes in the history of early America, the Spanish Borderlands, American Indians, and women and gender. Her book, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2007. She is currently a University of Florida Research Foundation Professor and is hard at work on a new book, "La Dama Azul (The Lady in Blue): A Southwestern Origin Story for Early America."

Professor Marjorie Spruill teaches courses in U. S. women’s history, southern history, recent American history, and historical methodology at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern Statesand the editor of One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement. She is co-editor of The South in the History of the Nation: A Reader; the multi-volume anthology South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, and a two-volume Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives. Spruill has served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Southern Historical Association, and president of the Southern Association for Women Historians. She has served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern History and is currently on the Editorial Board of the Journal of American Studies, the journal of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS). In 2006-2007 she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.  She has recently been awarded fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation.

Eileen Boris is the Hull Professor and chair of the Department of Feminist Studies and an affiliate professor of history and black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Formerly a co-president of the Coordinating Council for Women in History, president of the board of trustees of The Journal of Women’s History, and co-chair of the program committee for the 2005 Thirteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, she currently serves on the executive committee of Labor and Working Class History Association. She is the author of Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America and Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States, which won the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History.

Kathryn Kish Sklar is Distinguished Professor of History and Co-Director of the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is the author of Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900 and other books and articles on women and social movements. Her first book, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity, analyzed how women reshaped gender identities and gender relationships in the antebellum era. She is currently completing a study of women and social movements in the Progressive era, 1900-1930. Sklar did her graduate work at the University of Michigan, earning a master’s degree in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1969. She also has an honorary doctorate from Eastern Michigan University.

Jean Pfaelzer is Professor of English, Women's Studies and Asian Studies. During Spring, 2011, she was the Senior Fulbright Scholar in American Culture at the University of Utrecht, ND. She is the author of Driven Out! The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans and the author of four other books including The Utopian Novel in America and Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism. Prof. Pfaelzer has just signed an advance contract for forthcoming book: Of Human Bondage: Slavery in California. Jeannie's BA and MA are from the University of California, Berkeley. She then went to Cambridge University, UK, to study with Raymond Williams on the Politics of Culture where she received a Graduate Diploma, and finished her Ph.D. Dissertation on American Utopianism at University College, London.