Andrew Denson, Western Carolina University
Proposal Type
Roundtable
Seeking
- Seeking Additional Presenters
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
Related Topics
- Memory
- Place
- Social Justice
Abstract
This session will explore current public history projects that seek to reshape the identities of university campuses by interpreting lost or suppressed histories. Participants will examine the roles played by historical memory in defining the institutional character of universities and the college campus as a place. In describing specific ongoing projects, participants will discuss the promise (and limitations) of public campus history as a means of fostering more just and inclusive educational institutions.
Description
Two presenters have committed to this proposed session. Each of us will describe work in progress, rather than completed projects. We would like to follow either a structured conversation or roundtable format, with only brief individual presentations and an emphasis on discussion.
Jennifer Dickey’s “Finding Freemantown” examines ongoing research and interpretation at the site of a nineteenth-century African American community on the campus of Berry College in northern Georgia. Originally founded to serve the white rural poor, Berry long ignored the black history of the place that became its home. Today, research and interpretation focus on a cemetery that forms the only physical remnant of the African American settlement. Public interpretation at the Freemantown cemetery has the potential to reshape the historical identity of Berry’s campus.
Andrew Denson’s “Settler College in a Cherokee Place” explores the history of Western Carolina University’s relationship with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. The university is located in Cullowhee, North Carolina, on the site of a Cherokee town and just a few miles from the Qualla Boundary, the Eastern Band’s main land base. While the university has periodically acknowledged Cullowhee’s indigenous past, it has generally done so in ways that render that history irrelevant to the institution’s contemporary mission. Today, Native American studies faculty, in partnership with Eastern Band authorities, are working to make the region’s indigenous past and present a more central element of campus identity through historic interpretation, public art, and campus programming.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Andrew Denson, [email protected].
All feedback and offers of assistance should be submitted by July 1, 2018.If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
I’d be very interested in thinking about and participating in this panel. I work as a public historian at Princeton University on a variety of projects aimed at incorporating the stories of marginalized groups into the university’s historical narrative. So far, these have taken the form of an exhibit and a series of themed historical walking tours of campus, with additional initiatives in the works.
Feel free to be in touch.
There was a fascinating project at IUPUI some years ago doing the archaeology of the urban renewal that created the campus: more information here: http://www.iupui.edu/~anthpm/bio.html
This is such an endlessly fascinating topic! Do make sure to have a look at the working group from a couple of years ago that tackled this same topic. The facilitators were Monica Mercado, Anne Mitchell Whisnant, and Caitlin Starr Cohn, and I’m not sure if there was any specific written or other product from this group (sometimes there is) – if so, it would be great to see this proposed panel building on it in some way, as well as perhaps linking more explicitly with the conference theme of “repair” and the question of what exactly is being repaired through these kinds of campus efforts.
Thanks for these great suggestions! I followed the working group a bit at the time, and Anne recently pointed me in the direction of the Facebook group that emerged from that conversation. I’ve found both really helpful.
I’m interesting in joining this panel. I teach early African American literature at Clemson University, which was built in the late 1800s on proslavery American statesman John C. Calhoun’s former Fort Hill Plantation, and I participated in the working group that Cathy Stanton mentions in her comment above. I’m currently a member of Clemson University’s History Task Force Implementation team, which has made some progress in incorporating the history of marginalized groups on the built landscape, mostly through historical markers and a potential discovery center still in the planning stage. I’m also the director of my own project, Call My Name: African Americans in Early Clemson University History, which seeks further repair the institution’s complex public history by recovering and sharing the history of enslaved persons and sharecroppers who labored on Fort Hill, convict laborers who built the institutions, wage laborers who maintained the infrastructure, musicians who performed for segregated social events, and the students, faculty and staff who came to Clemson during the first decade of integration in a variety of ways, including an exhibit, a digital humanities project, and books for a variety of audiences.
Thank you for this reply. I just sent an email message to your university address.