Recovering the women history left out, and showing an audience exactly how it is done.
Jill George holds a Ph.D. in industrial and organizational psychology from the University of Tennessee and spent three decades advising C-suite leaders on how people, power, and reputation actually work, then turned those same tools on the historical record. She is the author of eight books, including an American Fiction Award finalist and an Editor’s Pick at both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews.
Her talks draw on the French Bourbon court, nineteenth-century Virginia, and the eighteenth-century Ohio Valley. She shows audiences how women are erased from the record, why the erasure is structural rather than accidental, and how the evidence that restores them is often hiding inside a document everyone has already read. In 2026 she led a public walking tour of Richmond’s women’s sites in partnership with the Valentine Museum.
A behavioral-science detective story. Using real manuscripts and archival discoveries, including an autograph manuscript that diverges from every published edition of its text, Jill reveals the recurring mechanisms by which women vanish from the record, and the methods that bring them back. Audiences leave with a new lens on every history they thought they knew.
Twenty-four enslaved and freed women across four Virginia cities, and the cross-racial partnerships that made their survival and their institution-building possible. Includes Rachel Findlay winning her freedom in an Augusta County courtroom and Lucy Goode Brooks founding Richmond’s first Black-run orphanage.
The self-made man was made by women. His mother held land she could direct and never sell. A Mingo Seneca clan mother in the Ohio Country cost a twenty-one-year-old officer three winter miles for a failure of courtesy. An enslaved woman named in a 1754 lease built the gentry life he stood in. A famous life read from the women outward.
Thirty years of organizational psychology applied to the historical record. What the behavioral evidence shows about how people build trust across difference under surveillance, scarcity, and threat, and what that means for the teams and institutions we run now.
Keynote or lecture, forty-five to sixty minutes with question time. Workshop, ninety minutes to a half day. Guided walking tour developed with the host institution. Panel and moderated conversation. Virtual programs.
Museums, historical societies, and humanities councils. Libraries and community read programs. Universities and writing conferences. Corporate and executive education. Women’s organizations and conferences.
The Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia: public walking tour of the women’s sites, 2026. History Through Fiction Conference: workshop instructor and program faculty. The History Quill: workshop instructor. University of Tennessee: instructor.
“Jill conducted a three hour walking tour for the Valentine based on her book Daughters of Stone and Grace, keeping the audience engaged the entire time. She provided fascinating details from her research, moving stories of resilience, and knowledgeable insights, while also fielding questions from participants. She met our needs entirely and we would gladly invite her back.”
Tell us your audience, your date, and the format you have in mind, and we will come back with availability and terms. A speaker sheet and high-resolution photograph are available above and on request.
