Participants

  • (she/hers)

    www.oshermaps.org

    Libby Bischof is Executive Director of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education and Professor of History at the University of Southern Maine where she teaches courses in Maine History, History and Photography, Popular Culture, and Public History. A visual and cultural historian of the 19th and 20th centuries, Bischof is interested in the ways in which friendship informs cultural production, especially in relation to landscape and place. A public historian, Bischof believes deeply in site-based, hands-on education, and the ways in which teaching local and regional history can lead to deeper civic engagement. She frequently lectures to public audiences throughout New England, and serves on the board of the New England Historical Association and as President of the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium. She lives with her husband and children in Gorham, Maine, and when she’s not working, she’s either swimming or sending postcards.

    Bibliography of relevant scholarship:

    Libby Bischof, Susan Danly, and Earle Shettleworth, Jr. Maine Photography: A History, 1840-2015 (Down East Books/Rowman & Littlefield and the Maine Historical Society, January 2016).

    Winner, 2017 Historic New England Honor Book Prize

    Libby Bischof and Susan Danly, Maine Moderns: Art in Seguinland, 1900-1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

    Winner, 2013 New England Society Book Award for Best Book in Art and Photography

    “Navigating the Real and the Imagined in the North Atlantic and the Arctic,” in Down Иorth: North Atlantic Triennial Catalog (Portland Museum of Art/Reykjavik Art Museum, 2022), 172-187.

    “Postcards from the River: Picturing the Presumpscot in the Early-Twentieth Century,” in Robert Sanford, ed., in Robert M. Sanford and William S. Plumley, Eds., River Voices: Perspectives on the Presumpscot (North Country Press, September 2020).

    “A Region Apart: Representations of Maine and Northern New England in Personal Film, 1920-1940,” in Martha McNamara and Karan Sheldon, eds., Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915-1960. (Indiana University Press, June 2017). Winner, Best Edited Collection, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2018.

    "The Lens of the Local: Teaching an Appreciation of the Past through the Exploration of Local Sites, Landmarks, and Hidden Histories," in The History Teacher, (vol. 48, no. 3, May 2015), 529-559. http://www.societyforhistoryeducation.org/pdfs/M15_Bischof.pdf

  • (she/her/s)

    Maia L. Butler is Associate Professor of African American Literature at UNC Wilmington and affiliate faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies, Africana Studies, and Graduate Liberal Studies. She is a literary geographer researching and teaching in African American/Diasporic, Anglophone Postcolonial, and American (broadly conceived) studies, with an emphasis on Black women’s literature and feminist theories. She is the Co-founding Vice President of the Edwidge Danticat Society and co-editor of a volume titled Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (Mississippi UP 2022), and has chapters in the collections Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat (Bloomsbury 2021), Approaches to Teaching the Work of Edwidge Danticat (Routledge 2019), and Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge 2019). She has collaborative work in a colloquium section of Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies called “Sowing the Seeds: Decolonial Practices and Pedagogies” (September 2020) and an article in College Literature titled “Blogging Race, Blogging Nation: Digital Diaspora as Home in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah,” (2022). Her monograph-in-progress explores Black women and nonbinary writers’ postnational imaginaries and her project in development will address teaching gendered racial histories of place through Black women’s literature of the circumCaribbean South.

  • Carpenter began her teaching and research as an independent scholar associated with Earthrise Farm, an organic farm and retreat center in western Minnesota, run by Sisters Kay and Annette Fernholz of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. She then moved to St. Catherine University in St. Paul, where she is a professor in the Theology Department and Women’s Studies Program. From 2014-2017, she served as the Sister Mona Riley Endowed Professor in the Humanities, and was then named a Carondelet Scholar. Her research addresses the intersection of spirituality, the imagination, and the Earth; she is especially interested in how the stories we tell shape the world within which we live. Her work in ecotheology and ecospirituality are the context for her interest in environmental justice.

  • (he/him)

    Muhlenberg College

    https://muhlenberg.edu/facultysearch/facultyresults/bcarter/

    Ben Carter is an archaeologist who central focus is the interface between landscapes, labor and movement. Currently his research focuses on the production of charcoal for the iron industry of nineteenth century Pennsylvania (and beyond). Charcoal is made by colliers who live deep in the forest for much of the year converting large mounds of wood into charcoal and living in small, conical huts. In southeastern Pennsylvania, this landscape was utilized to move Black freedom seekers between and across violent spaces. In some places, small, rural Black communities were able to employ the “waste” (i.e. nonarable) lands of the charcoal forests owned by the iron furnaces as common lands, sustainably extracting wood, stone, food, medicine and more from the landscape. This research is moving outwards from a single community and its descendants to better understand interconnections and mutual aid networks across small, rural Black communities in the nineteenth century.

    Carter, Benjamin P. 2022. “Black History, Charcoal and State Lands.” Penn’s Stewards: News from the Pennsylvania Parks & Forests Foundation, 2022. https://paparksandforests.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/PPFF_2022FallNewsletter_Web.pdf

    Camp, Stacey L., Benjamin P. Carter, Autumn M. Painter, Sarah M. Rowe, and Kathryn Sampeck. 2022. “Teaching Archaeological Mapping and Data Management with KoBoToolbox.” In Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice: Presentation, Teaching, and Engagement, edited by Ethan Watrall and Lynne Goldstein, 271–97. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/101535/.

    Blackadar, Jeff, Benjamin Carter, and Weston Conner. 2021. “Object Detection Model, Image Data and Results from the ‘When Computers Dream of Charcoal: Using Deep Learning, Open Tools and Open Data to Identify Relict Charcoal Hearths in and Around State Game Lands in Pennsylvania’ Paper.” Journal of Open Archaeology Data 9: NA. https://doi.org/10.5334/joad.81 .

    Carter, Benjamin P., Jeff H. Blackadar, and Weston L. A. Conner. 2021. “When Computers Dream of Charcoal: Using Deep Learning, Open Tools, and Open Data to Identify Relict Charcoal Hearths in and around State Game Lands in Pennsylvania.” Advances in Archaeological Practice 9 (4). Cambridge University Press: 257–71. https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2021.17 .

    Conner, Weston, Benjamin Carter, and Jeff Blackadar. 2021. “Geospatial and Image Data from the ‘When Computers Dream of Charcoal: Using Deep Learning, Open Tools and Open Data to Identify Relict Charcoal Hearths in and Around State Game Lands in Pennsylvania’ Paper.” Journal of Open Archaeology Data 9: NA. https://doi.org/10.5334/joad.80.

  • Dr. Charity Clay is a Critical Race Sociologist of the African Diaspora. She currently teaches in the sociology department at Xavier University of Louisiana, an HBCU in New Orleans. She is the head of the major concentration in crime and social Justice. Her work centers around Pan-African liberation and resistance movements dating back to 17th century Marronage throughout the Americas, and addressing current Anti Police-Terror Movements and those under the umbrella of #BlackLivesMatter in the United States and abroad. As an affiliated faculty member of the African American and Diaspora studies she has worked to develop study abroad opportunities for students throughout the African diaspora with centering around Afro-Indigeneity an the “Americas” and transatlantic Blackness outside of the United States

    Links to published/practice-oriented work:

    Thinkpiece - “Star Spangled Blackness” https://www.boukmanacademy.com/think-pieces/star-spangled-blackness

    Docuseries short for project about Maroon Communities in the Americas – Palenque de Benkos https://www.instagram.com/reel/CiF6fy5JrZG/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

    Podcast series – Season one: “How White Supremacy Benefits from Black Protests”; Season two: “Black America’s Exit Plan”. https://anchor.fm/urfavcharity/episodes/Season-One-Trailer-ef63cr/a-a2dsm9e

    Co-authored Book Chapter – Solidarity, Double Consciousness, and Collective Emotion Work: Understanding Negative Black Health Outcomes Resulting from Systemic Police Terror. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/S0195-744920180000020009/full/html

  • (she/her)

    Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies

    Florida International University (Ph.D. expected Spring 2023)

    www.alexandrapgelbard.wordpress.com

    Alexandra P. Gelbard is a sociologically grounded, multidisciplinary, qualitative researcher, and photographer. Her specialization areas include African Diaspora Studies, cultural production, religion, and community formation, with a regional focus on Cuba and the Atlantic world. Her current work examines community formation and the relationship to cultural production and religion amongst African descendants in Cuba, focusing upon street processional spaces as community purposeful sites of interaction, relations, collective memory, and placemaking. She is currently working on her first book manuscript examining the conga street processionals in Santiago de Cuba and serves as a researcher and the coordinator for the documentary archival team for the Cabildo de Regla community project in Regla, La Habana, Cuba. She is originally from Washington, D.C. and currently resides in Miami, Florida.

    Publications:

    Gelbard, Alexandra P. 2015. “Baltimore’s Uprising: Diasporic Liberation and Place” in Present Tense: Race, Violence, and the State Special Issue 5(2) http://www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-5/baltimores-uprising-diasporic-liberation-consciousness-and-place/

  • (he/him)

    Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Swarthmore College

    https://www.briangoldstein.org

    Brian D. Goldstein is an architectural and urban historian and an associate professor at Swarthmore College. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of the built environment, race and class, and social movements, especially in the United States in the twentieth century. In particular, he is interested in the ways trained architects, community organizations, and neighborhood activists have worked to reshape buildings and plans in the struggle for civil rights. His writing includes The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle Over Harlem (expanded edition, Princeton University Press, 2023), winner of the 2020 John Friedmann Book Award and 2019 Lewis Mumford Prize for the Best Book in Planning History. He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Graham Foundation, and Society of Architectural Historians. He is currently writing If Architecture Were for People: The Life and Work of J. Max Bond, Jr., under contract with Princeton University Press.

    Published Work:

    The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle Over Harlem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Expanded edition (Princeton University Press), 2023. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691234755/the-roots-of-urban-renaissance

    “Rehabbing Housing, Rehabbing People: West 114th Street and the Failed Promise of Housing Rehabilitation,” Buildings & Landscapes 26, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 43-72.https://doi.org/10.5749/buildland.26.2.0043

    “‘The Search for New Forms’: Black Power and the Making of the Postmodern City,” Journal of American History 103, no. 2 (Sept. 2016): 375-399. https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw181

    “The Invisible Brother With a Brick,” Black Lives Matter Dossier, eds. Meredith TenHoor and Jonathan Massey (Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative (online), 2015). https://doi.org/10.53965/ARMK4272

    “Planning’s End? Urban Renewal in New Haven, the Yale School of Art and Architecture, and the Fall of the New Deal Spatial Order,” Journal of Urban History 37, no. 3 (May 2011): 400-422. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144211400382

  • (she/her)

    LaToya Gray-Sparks is a Master of Urban and Regional Planning Candidate (2023) at the Wilder School of Government at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research interests include urban history, historic preservation, housing policy and geographic information systems (GIS). In 2020, LaToya received international recognition for her story map titled, Planned Destruction, which outlines the history of urban planning on Black residents in Richmond, Virginia. LaToya is currently an Assistant Historian at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, where she is working on projects to increase the number of Black historic landmarks recognized in the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places.

    LaToya currently serves as a Board member of the North American Cartographic Information Society and the Partnership for Smarter Growth. She also serves as a Policy Advisory Committee member of Housing Opportunities Made Equal and is a member of the Descendants Council of Greater Richmond Virginia.

    Websites:

    Planned Destruction

    The Reconstructing Randolph Project

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/latoya-gray-sparks/

  • (she/her)

    Melanee C. Harvey is associate professor of art history in the Department of Art in the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University. She earned a BA from Spelman College and pursued graduate study at Boston University where she received her MA and PhD in American Art and Architectural History. In addition to serving as coordinator for the art history area of study, she has served as programming chair for the James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora at Howard University since 2016. She has published on architectural iconography in African American art, Black Arts Movement artists, religious art of Black liberation theology and ecowomanist art practices. During the 2020-2021 academic year, Melanee was in residence as the Paul Mellon Guest Scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. She is currently writing her first book entitled, Patterns of Permanence: African Methodist Episcopal Architecture and Visual Culture.

  • (she/her)

    Institutional Affiliation: Johns Hopkins University, Doctoral Candidate, History

    www.dominiquehazzard.com

    Dominique Hazzard is a doctoral candidate in History at Johns Hopkins University specializing in food and environmental history, histories of the District of Columbia, and 20th century Black social movements. Dominique is an oral historian and public history practitioner. She has led multiple oral history projects funded by DC Humanities; she is the Resident Historian at the Well at Oxon Run, an urban farm and wellness space nested in Southeast DC’s Oxon Run Park; and she co-curated Food for the People: Eating and Activism in Greater Washington, a Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum exhibition that won the 2021-2022 Smithsonian Award for Excellence in Exhibitions.

    Dominique is also a local food justice advocate, a black freedom organizer, and the Board Chair of DC Greens, a food and health equity organization in the District of Columbia. She hails from Prince George’s County, MD and has made Anacostia home.

  • (she/her)

    Kathryn Howell is an associate professor of Urban and Regional Planning in the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University and the co-director of the RVA Eviction lab. Her research centers physical and cultural displacement in changing cities and investigates ways that policy and planning can be used to reduce housing and community instability. As the co-founder and co-director of the RVA Eviction Lab, Dr. Howell explores the impacts of housing instability on mobilization and organizing through collaborative partnerships with community organizations in Richmond, Virginia. Dr. Howell worked in state and local government positions in Maryland and Washington, DC focused on affordable housing preservation and inclusionary zoning. She holds a master’s degree in public policy from the Johns Hopkins University and a PhD in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas.

    Kathryn Howell and Benjamin F. Teresa (2022) “The Map of Race is the Map of Richmond”: Eviction and the Enduring Regimes of Racialized Dispossession and Political Demobilization. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City. https://doi.org/10.1080/26884674.2022.2084478

    Meghan Gough, Kathryn Howell & Hannah Cameron (2022) Whiteness in Black Sacred Spaces: Power, Process and Predicament in Preserving Historic Black Cemeteries. Planning Theory and Practice https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2022.2113557

    Kathryn Howell (2021) Affordable Housing Preservation in Washington, DC: A Framework for Local Funding, Collaborative Governance, and Community Organizing for Change. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Publishing. https://www.routledge.com/Affordable-Housing-Preservation-in-Washington-DC-A-Framework-for-Local/Howell/p/book/9780367333096

    Kathryn Howell. (2018). Stability, advocacy and voice: Opportunities and challenges in resident-led preservation of affordable housing. Housing Studies. 34 (8), 1330-1348. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2018.1538449

    Kathryn Howell. (2017). “For the kids”: Children, safety and the depoliticization of displacement in Washington, DC, Journal of Urban Affairs. 40 (5), 721-739. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2017.1360742

  • (she/her/hers)

    Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Literatures, Department of English, Oklahoma State University

    Alyssa A. Hunziker is an assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University where she researches and teaches in the field of Native American and Indigenous literatures. Her current book manuscript, Histories in Common: Indigenous Literatures and the Extra Archives of U.S. Empire, studies moments of connection and convergence between global Indigenous communities in literature—from Native North America to the Philippines, Guam, the Marshall Islands, and Viet Nam—connecting the U.S.’s occupation of North America to its Pacific empire. She is the book review editor for American Indian Quarterly, an editorial board member for Studies in American Indian Literatures, and co-editor of a double special issue of College Literature, “Genres of Empire.” Her recent publications are published or forthcoming in American Quarterly, Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and Settler Colonial Studies.

    https://cas.okstate.edu/department_of_english/faculty_profiles/alyssa_hunziker.html

    Published Work:

    “Chinese Exclusion, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonial Refusal in C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States

    “Playing Indian, Playing Filipino: Native American and Filipino Exchange at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School,” American Quarterly, Volume 72, Issue 2. June 2020. DOI: 10.1353/aq.2020.0031

    “At the Intersections of Empire: Ceremony, Transnationalism, and American Indian-Filipino Exchange,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 31, Number 3-4. Fall 2019-Winter 2020. muse.jhu.edu/article/749195

    “Toni Morrison, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism,” Settler Colonial Studies, Volume 8, Issue 4. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2017.1371384

  • “I am Dr. Alaine Hutson and I joined Huston-Tillotson University in fall of 2008 as an associate professor of History. I have also taught at Missouri State University for nine years, Michigan State University, and Houston Community College. I specialize in African and Middle East history with an emphasis on slavery and gender in Islamic societies. I also teach environmental history.

    My research is currently surrounding the question: Is there an African Diaspora in the Middle East? In pursuit of that research I have recently traveled to seminars and conferences in: Cape Town, South Africa; Amman, Jordan; and Salzburg, Austria. I have been a UNCF/Mellon Faculty Fellow resident at the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University and a Henry C. McBay Fellow. While resident at JWJI I founded and continue to edit the REMAP database website (www.remapdatabase.org ). I also have received a grant from the Sam Taylor Fellowship from the United Methodist Church.

    I have two academic articles forthcoming: “REMAPping the African Diaspora: Place, Gender, and Negotiation in Arabian Slavery.” In Gendering Knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora: Navigating a Contested Terrain, eds. Toyin Falola and Mickie Koster, Amherst, NY: Cambria Press and “ ‘His Original Name Is . . .’ : REMAPping the slave experience in Saudi Arabia.” In Forms of Bonded Labour: Conceptual Approaches Towards a New Comparative Research Framework, eds. Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf, et al, Bielefeld, Germany: transcript, 2016 and several previous publications include “Enslavement and Manumission of Africans and Yemenis in Saudi Arabia, 1926-1938.” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies; “African Sufi Women and Ritual Change” in the Journal of Ritual Studies and “Gender, Mobility, and Sharia Law in Northern Nigeria” in International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) Newsletter.”

  • Nkem Ike is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at The University of Tulsa studying African diaspora archeology and, more specifically, the archeology of race massacres. She is the co-founder of the Graduate Diversity and Inclusion Coalition and has long advocated for issues of diversity and inclusion. Her nominator said of her: “She is instrumental in bringing new training initiatives about race and inclusion to the university and department. [She] always is determined to reset the dialogue about inclusion and help students and faculty higher levels of understanding.”

  • Ph.D. Candidate, History and Theory of Architecture, Princeton University

    https://soa.princeton.edu/content/angelika-joseph

    Angelika Joseph is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, where she is also affiliated with the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, Program in Latin American Studies, Effron Center for the Study of America, and Center for Digital Humanities. Joseph’s dissertation examines the Red Power Movement(1969-73) as an architectural project for Indigenous sovereignty. Uniting spatial and cultural modes of analysis, this dissertation explores the strategies by which Red Power Movement activists designed social, cultural, and political transformations, weaponizing landscapes shaped by their oppressors against the state and creating new worlds within old architectural forms. In2020, Joseph was named a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and a President’s Fellow at Princeton University. Joseph is a Diversity Fellow at Princeton University, and a former Mellon Foundation Fellow and Rosenbloom Fellow at the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

    Publications:

    https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/sick-architecture/465002/alcohol-after-theapocalypse/

    http://arccadigest.org/indigeneity/

  • J.T. Roane is an assistant professor of Africana Studies and Geography and Andrew W. Mellon chair in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University.

    He received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and he is a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He currently serves as the lead of the Black Ecologies Initiative at ASU's Institute for Humanities Research. He is the former co-senior editor of Black Perspectives, the digital platform of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). Roane's scholarly essays have appeared in Souls Journal, The Review of Black Political Economy, Current Research in Digital History and, Signs. His work has also appeared in venues such as Washington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, Pacific Standard, and The Immanent Frame.

  • (she/her)

    Assistant Professor of Urban Geography, University Honors College, Portland State University

    Rebecca Summer is an assistant professor of urban geography in the University Honors College at Portland State University. Her research concerns the intersections of urban history, historic preservation, and gentrification in American cities, particularly Washington, D.C. She is primarily interested in understanding the relationships between “ordinary” or “vernacular” landscapes–such as alleys or neglected industrial sites–and contemporary phenomena like the aesthetics of urban development, senses of belonging in cities, and gentrification-driven displacement. She also contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning, and enjoys involving undergraduate students in research. She teaches place-based courses in Portland, including qualitative research methods and seminars on gentrification and reading the urban landscape.

    https://www.pdx.edu/profile/rebecca-summer

    Published work:

    Summer, R. (2022). Writing out Black history in Washington, D.C.: How historical narratives support a performance of progressiveness in gentrifying urban spaces. Urban Geography 43(7): 1108-1127. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2021.1902141 Published early access March 22, 2021.

    Summer, R. (2021). Comparing mid-century historic preservation and urban renewal through Washington, D.C.’s alley dwellings. Journal of Planning History. https://doi.org/10.1177/1538513221997797 Published early access March 23, 2021.

    Summer, R. (2021). Exposing the legal and bureaucratic underpinnings of gentrification: Municipal property transfers through alley closures in Washington, D.C. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 39(5): 955-971. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654420970952 Published early access November 13, 2020.

    Summer, R., & Nelson, G.N (2020). Making stories significant: Possibilities and challenges at the intersection of digital methods and historic preservation. Area 52(2): 282-290. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12395 Published early access October 16, 2017.

    Summer, R. (2018). “This Is Ivy City”: An iconic building's role in gentrification and neighborhood identity in Washington, D.C. Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 25(1), 23-43. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/701433

  • Assistant Professor, Literature and Languages, Heritage University

    M.F.A. Creative Nonfiction (in-process)

    M.A. Multicultural English Literature and Language, Heritage University

    www.annkendall.com

    Prior to teaching, Ann worked for over 20 years in nonprofit management in the arts, architecture and human services. Today, her teaching philosophy reflects these intersecting experiences that guide her approach to course design, pedagogy and student relationships. To each class she brings the idea of interdisciplinary grace – acknowledging that each student’s life experience is valuable, and that all experiences brought to the classroom can cross disciplines seamlessly within the realm of multiple-Englishes. Ann’s service to the Heritage Literature and Languages department includes grants research (federal) and course delivery innovation.

    Recent Presentations:

    Heritage University Faculty Scholarship Series

    Interrogating Landscape Narratives: Black and Indigenous Place-Stories in Washington, D.C.

    Mellon Mays Guest Lecturer, Undergraduate Fellowship Program (MMUF)

    Where They Walked: Langston Hughes & Contemporaries

    Monuments and Memories in D.C.

    Public Art & Architecture of D.C. through a Literary Lens.

    Escape, Abolition and the Underground Railroad in D.C.

  • La Barbara James Wigfall, is an Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture and Regional & Community Planning at Kansas State University. She holds a bachelor's degree in architecture from Howard University and a master's degree in City and Regional Planning with an Urban Design focus from Harvard University. Since 1977, she has augmented her private practice with faculty appointments at Howard University, College of Medicine; The University of Texas, and The University of California/Berkeley. Her ten-year, professional practice in Texas, Fly Associates, Inc., focused on more traditional planning/landscape architecture projects. She joined the Kansas State faculty in 1987, receiving the Presidential Award for Distinguished Service to Minority Education in 1996 and the Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2010. Professor Wigfall is the first Visiting Fellow for Multiculturalism and Diversity at the University of Arkansas/Fayetteville in 1995, and the first African American female faculty member to receive tenure and promotion at K-State in 1997. In her 36 years at K-State, she has garnered numerous K-State awards for distinguished service to multicultural education, community engagement, and outstanding undergraduate teaching. She was a Civic Engagement Fellow through the Kettering Foundation and the Office of the Provost, Centers for Engagement and Community Development/Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy. Through these entities and the Center for Hazardous Substance Research on campus, Professor Wigfall co-taught training sessions for staff and prospective facilitators, engagement workshops for Kansas communities, and visioning sessions for brownfields sites in neighboring states. Her community development classes have address planning challenges for Vice President on the campus Memorial Stadium history and adaptive reuse, competitive regional bike trails, home-to-school open space amenities, and reactivating Etzanoa—a five-mile-long indigenous settlement on this continent between 1425 and early 1700s, discovered by Spanish soldiers in 1601. These field efforts always included advanced design students and/or graduate level teams to give them opportunities to utilize their practical skills and knowledge in “real life” problem-solving.

    In 2012 and 2013, Professor Wigfall, led a team of 29 faculty and 32 students, and awarded Stage Two Finalist in Parks for the People student design competition, based upon her 30 years of work with Nicodemus, Kansas, and later received the 2013 KSU Excellence in Community Development and Engagement Award for the collaborative project with Nicodemus, KS, and National Park Service. Her professional work, entitled “Black Settlements In America” began in 1980 under Entourage, Inc., a nonprofit, 501(C)(3) research and education organization she co-founded to investigate the history and evolution of black communities towards the cultivation of human and cultural elements as vehicles for building livable communities for people of color. This precursory research on black settlements is internationally recognized and cited along with her two Fulbright Study Abroad awards to Senegal, West Africa and Tanzania, East Africa, in 1999 and 2005. Multiple faculty-led travel allowed her continuation of identifying patterns in The Gambia, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, and Botswana environments that explained African American antecedents in the U.S. Diverse teams of students and faculty participated in the travel orientation beforehand and student presentations upon return. In addition, Professor Wigfall produced multi-media presentations accompanied by musicians, fashion, and food tasting celebrations sponsored by the University Library after each African exploration. Contracted stateside projects in Dallas, Oklahoma City, Miami, Oakland, Nicodemus, and Lincoln Hills, Co, and multiple lectures at Harvard, Cornell, Berkeley, North Carolina, National Park Service workshops and National Trust conferences have also inspired numerous scholars to identify and document cultural resources in their chosen jurisdictions.

    Last year, Professor Wigfall became a Fellow in the K-State Teaching and Learning Center and a NEH Summer Institute Scholar at Harvard University’s prestigious Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. The 23 scholars of 75 nationwide applicants were selected based upon their developed research and creative activities centered around black and indigenous people’s cultural influence on the landscape. Ultimately, her work in communities emphasizes the cultivation of human and cultural elements as a vehicle for building sustainable communities. She received one of two KSU National Endowment for Humanities grants last year to digitally document the migration of the first settlers to Nicodemus via Ellis Trail. She also received a grant from the Trust for Public Lands via NPS Foundation to conduct a community engagement process meant to capture community input for the reprogramming of the current services in the community’s Township Hall and for a new NPS Visitor Center at Nicodemus. Both these projects have included key planning, landscape architecture and architecture student experiences. Based upon her 45-years of community engagement work, she also received the Ad Astra Award, the highest recognition bestowed on a planner, for outstanding contributions to the planning profession in the State of Kansas.

    Professor Wigfall’s commitment to cultural education, and community preservation through community engagement and visioning, appreciative inquiry, and citizen empowerment continues to highlight the dynamic role and service cultural landscapes have performed in our nation’s history.

    Selected Publications:

    The People’s Park, Historic Site at Nicodemus, La Barbara James Wigfall, editor, Parks for the People Competition, Van Alen Institute/National Park Service, submitted 2012, revised 2014.

    “Consensus Imagination: Design competition in a non-studio setting”, La Barbara James Wigfall, Carla Jackson Bell, Space Unveiled, Taylor & Francis Group, Routledge Publishing, 2014, pgs. 206-214

    “Creating Socially Just Communities: A Multicultural Student Center grounded in Consensus Imagination”, NOMA Magazine, Winter issue, January 2017

    Four Theorems of African Archetype and Landscape (ARCC)

    “Waiting on the Dawn at demus”, Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race, Craig E. Barton, Princeton Architectural Press), 2001, pgs. 146-157

    “Ehnic Landscapes Come to Light: A creative methodology can dig deeply into a community’s memory and far-flung records”, Landscape Architecture, Preservation: Defining an Ethic, Everett L. and La Barbara Wigfall (Fly), Vol. 77, No.4, July/August 1987, pgs. 34-39

    Promised Land on the Solomon: Black Settlement at Nicodemus, KS, La Barbara Wigfall (Fly), Entourage, Inc., National Park Service, U.S. Dept. of Interior), 1986

    Black Settlements, Built in the USA: American Buildings from Airports to Zoos, Everett L. and La Barbara Wigfall (Fly), Diane Maddex, National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, Washington, D.C., Preservation Press, c.1985, pgs. 28-31

    Black Settlements in America 1865 to present, research and ten posters, A Flypaper Production, Entourage, Inc., c. 1980

  • Matthew Wilson, PhD

    Assistant Professor, Ball State University

    https://drmatthewrwilson.com

    Matthew Wilson is writer, historian, and designer. His work explores the impact of nineteenth- and twentieth century intellectuals and social and environmental justice advocates on the built environment. Of his two current book projects the first Topographies of Oppression and Resistance in Black Communities: Critical Theories of Place Studies employs case studies to reveal and deconstruct the connections between race, place, and power across four centuries of United States history. His second project Positivism and the Origins of Feminism: Nineteenth-century British Women Philosophers is under contract with Manchester University Press. It demonstrates how women thinkers advanced, and at times undermined, the philosophical concepts of Comtean Positivism within debates over social science, literature, art, design, and social and political activism. Wilson holds an MA in Landscape Urbanism (with distinction) from the Architectural Association and a PhD in History from Royal Holloway, University of London.

    Recent works:

    Understanding Site in Design Pedagogy. https://bit.ly/3UPJtP0

    Moralising Space: the Utopian Urbanism of the British Positivists, 1855–1920. https://bit.ly/3Td5Qwy

    Richard Congreve, Positivist Politics, the Victorian Press and the British Empire. https://bit.ly/3t4rRmJ