Carrie Bowers has been the Collections Manager at the National Museum of the Marine Corps (NMMC) since April 2021. Previously she was a Museum Specialist for the Collections Branch since 2010. She supervisors the Collections Management Section (CMS) whose primary focus is processing, cataloging, and storing the Museum’s artifacts. The CMS also supports exhibit installations; temporary artifact displays for public programming; loan preparation; and the COR for the conservation of historic artifacts and textiles.

Prior to the NMMC, Ms. Bowers held a variety of public history positions at local institutions including the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Park Service. Ms. Bowers received her Bachelor of Arts in history from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA in 2002, and her Master of Arts in American History in 2006 from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. During her graduate program, she completed multiple archival internships with George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens, George Mason University’s Special Collections and Archives, and the Alexandria Archives Center. In 2013 she completed her graduate certificate in Museum Collections Management and Care Distance Education from The George Washington University.

From 2004 through 2006 she served as a graduate research assistant on two publications for Dr. Linda A. Fisher. The first, The Whiskey Merchant’s Diary:  An Urban Life in the Emerging Midwest (Ohio University Press, 2007), is a young man’s account of his rollicking bachelor life in Ohio and Missouri on the eve of the Civil War. In 2005, Ms. Bowers was added as co-author on the second publication, Agnes Lake Hickok:  Queen of the Circus, Wife of a Legend (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), published after the death of Dr. Fisher. The latter has resulted in two published articles regarding the life of Agnes Lake Hickok authored by Ms. Bowers.