UW Graduate Student Receives AHC Award for Victorian Murder Case Research

Andrea Hastings-Arrollo, a University of Wyoming master’s student in history, originally from Gillette, is the recipient of the 2025 American Heritage Center (AHC) Award for Graduate Student Research for her paper analyzing the controversial 1889 murder trial of Florence Maybrick. 

Hastings-Arrollo’s award-winning paper, titled “Gender Ideologies and Memory: A Case Study of the Murder Trial of Florence Maybrick,” examines how Victorian gender expectations influenced one of England’s most controversial murder trials and how the case was remembered decades later.  

“Andrea’s beautifully written paper tells a great story -- an unhappy Victorian marriage, a sensational murder trial and miscarriage of justice -- while connecting that story to the larger themes of crime, gender and memory,” says Peter Walker, an assistant professor in the UW Department of History. “It remains one of the best pieces of student work I have seen.”   

The $500 award recognizes excellence in graduate student research using primary sources at the AHC. Hastings-Arrollo’s research was based on materials from the Trevor Christie collection, which contains archives about the Maybrick case assembled by Christie for his 1968 book “Etched in Arsenic.”    

Maybrick, an American woman living in Victorian England, was convicted in 1889 of poisoning her husband with arsenic despite evidence so weak that government officials later admitted reasonable doubt about her actual guilt. Hastings-Arrollo’s analysis reveals how Victorian gender ideologies shaped the legal proceedings more than forensic evidence.  

“Andrea’s research exemplifies exactly the kind of original scholarship we seek to recognize through this award -- research that uses our archival materials to illuminate broader historical and social themes,” says UW Professor and AHC Director Paul Flesher.  

Currently supervised by UW history Professor Renee Laegreid, Hastings-Arrollo is working on her master’s thesis about women, rodeo and the American West.  

The AHC’s Graduate Student Research Award is open to UW graduate students in any discipline whose research is based substantially on the center’s primary sources. The next deadline for nominations is May 17, 2026.  

About UW’s American Heritage Center 

The AHC is a premier research facility with collections spanning Wyoming and the American West, business and industry, journalism, military history and popular culture. 

For more information, call (307) 766-3756 or email ahcref@uwyo.edu.