Visiting Scholars

  • Maia L. Butler (she/her/s) 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 Diasporic, Anglophone Postcolonial, and American (broadly conceived) studies, with an emphasis on Black women’s literature and feminist theories. Butler 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).

  • Benjamin P. Campbell is the author of Richmond’s Unhealed History. He directed two non-profit corporations, the Richmond Urban Institute, and Home Base, Incorporated, a neighborhood-based low-income housing corporation. He chairs the program committee of Communities in Schools, a program that supports volunteer efforts and social service work in the Richmond Public Schools. He is also a member of the Richmond Slave Trail Commission and the Richmond Public Schools Foundation. Campbell is a member of the Residential Community at Richmond Hill.

  • Allyson Gray (she/her/hers) is an enrolled Citizen of the Pamunkey Indian Tribe, residing most of her life on the Reservation in King William, Virginia. As a young child, she was fascinated by traditional Pamunkey blackware pottery created by her great-grandmother and other Pamunkey potters. Over the years, her passion and knowledge grew with the help of a few respected potters in her Tribal Community. Today, Allyson strives to expand her knowledge and hone in on her craft, while also sharing her passion with others, especially the youth in her Tribal Community. Though pottery is her passion, her greatest loves are her husband and son, Temple and Rocky.

  • Shaleigh Howells (she/they) works as a non-Native representative of the Pamunkey Indian Tribe, serving as the Tribe's Cultural Resources Director and NAGRPA Coordinator and as the Director of the Pamunkey Indian Museum & Cultural Center. Shaleigh is a graduate of Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (BA, History) and Harvard University (ALM, Museum Studies). Their areas of expertise include collections management, museum registration, deaccession, repatriation, cultural resources management and community engagement.

  • Erick Krigsvold is a Pamunkey Citizen, culture bearer and artist living in Richmond, VA. His work tells visual stories of Native Americans across the country with a focus on Virginia tribes and culture. Driven by his desire to explore and celebrate his Indigenous identity, Erick combines digital drawing with traditional techniques such as screen printing. Erick speaks with students and schools about Virginia Native history and culture and uses his website and social media accounts to facilitate tribal education and awareness. He advocates his mission of Indigenous Education Through Art through his work at the Pamunkey Museum and Pow Wows and other artist markets throughout Virginia. Erick is elevating the under-represented Native American voice in Virginia and ensuring that the rich stories of Virginia’s Indigenous people are not forgotten.

  • Kim Chen is the Senior Manager for the City of Richmond, Virginia. Her previous roles for the City of Richmond include “Principal Planner – Division of Planning” and “Preservation and Senior Preservation Planner.” She taught planning and historic preservation courses at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) for ten years. She holds a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from VCU and a bachelor’s degree in Architectural History and Architecture from the University of Virginia.

  • Ana Edwards is a public historian living and working in Richmond, Virginia, and currently works as education programs manager at the American Civil War Museum with K-12 students and educator professional development. She is a consulting historian on projects with universities, museums and independent historic sites. She chairs the Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project, founded in 2004 by the Virginia Defenders to promote the reclamation and memorialization of the African and African American history of Shockoe Bottom, once the epicenter of the U.S. domestic slave trade.

  • Rebecca Hill (Pamunkey) is a Radford University graduate with a BS in Art who studied Museum Studies at Hampton University. An early internship as a photographer at NASA Langley Research Center set off a lifelong fascination with photography. She has worked for decades as a professional photographer. Rebecca works in multiple capacities for the Pamunkey tribal government and is a founding member of the Virginia Native Arts Alliance, working towards preserving Pamunkey culture and art.

  • LaToya Gray-Sparks is a cartographer, historian, creator of the award winning StoryMap, “Planned Deconstruction,” and the founder of the “Reconstructing Randolph Project.” "Planned Destruction" received international recognition at a conference in 2020 for being best educational map. Since then, Gray-Sparks has been dedicated to documenting and mapping Black neighborhoods and spaces that were purposefully wiped off of the map and the urban landscape through discriminatory urban planning and housing practices. She is an affiliate faculty member at VCU.

  • Chioke I’Anson, PhD, is a lecturer in the VCU Richard T. Robertson School of Media and Culture. He is also one of the voices of NPR's sponsorship messages. Since 2016, he has tracked and delivered underwriting copy for newscasts and digital downloads. He is also a professor of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and is the Director of Community Media at VPM + ICA Community Media Center, which provides free workshops and training to anyone who wants to get into podcasts.

  • Michelle Magalong, PhD is a scholar-activist committed to elevating the stories of underrepresented peoples and places through historic preservation, planning, and policy.

    Dr. Magalong is an Assistant Professor in the Historic Preservation program at the University of Maryland's School of Architecture. Planning and Preservation, where she previously served as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow. She is affiliate faculty in Asian American Studies, American Studies, Center for Global Migration Studies, and Urban Studies and Planning. She served as President for Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation and now serves on its board of directors. Dr. Magalong serves on the Experts Advisory Committee for the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), the board of directors for the National Alliance of Preservation Commissions (NAPC), and the editorial board for The Public Historian, the journal for the National Council on Public History.  She received her BA in Ethnic Studies and Urban Studies and Planning at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and MA and PhD in Urban Planning at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). 

    Michelle worked in preserving historical Asian American neighborhoods and sites including Historic Filipinotown, Little Tokyo, and Thai Town in Los Angeles, and Little Manila in Stockton, California. She has served on advisory boards including for the National Park Service, State of California, City of Los Angeles, and in Washington, DC on their respective theme studies and context statements on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. She served on the board of directors for California Humanities. Michelle is a featured speaker at national conferences on historic preservation, advocacy, and the nonprofit sector, and was named "40 Under 40: People Saving Places" by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2018. Dr. Magalong was awarded the Distinguished Alumnae Award by the Pilipino Alumni Association of UCLA in 2022 and the Outstanding Teaching award from the University of Maryland's School of Architecture. Planning and Preservation in 2024. 

  • Tiffany King holds the Barbara and John Glynn Research Professorship in Democracy and Equity and is an Associate Professor of Women, Gender & Sexuality. King’s work is animated by abolitionist and decolonial traditions within Black Studies and Native/Indigenous Studies. She is the author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2020) which won the Lora Romero First Book Prize. She also co-edited Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Black Racism (Duke University Press, 2021).

  • Brian Palmer is a Peabody Award–winning journalist based in Richmond, Virginia. During his 30-year career he has photographed conflict, politics, activism, daily life, and more around the world. His photos have appeared in the New York Times, Buzzfeed, Narrative.ly; and his writing in Smithsonian Magazine, the New York Times, and the Nation; and audio on Reveal.

  • Tim Roberts, MA, RPA is a Secretary of the Interior-qualified, registered professional archaeologist with a 17-year career history in cultural resource management. He is an expert in the identification, evaluation, documentation, and interpretation of archaeological resources, with experience conducting investigations throughout the Southeast and Middle Atlantic, portions of the Northeast and the Upper Midwest, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, and overseas in Hungary and Russia. Tim is currently the Project Review Archaeologist at Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

  • LaDale Winling is an associate professor of history and core member of the public history program at Virginia Tech. His research and teaching explore urban and political history in the United States, especially how space, architecture, and geography shape politics, economic life, and daily experience. With collaborators, in 2016 he launched Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America. In 2018, he launched Electing the House of Representatives, 1840-2016, on Congressional elections. This work has been featured in The Atlantic, the New York Times, on National Public Radio, and other media outlets.

  • Jordy Yager is the Digital Humanities Fellow at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. He helped launch the African American Oral History Project with local filmmakers Lorenzo Dickerson and Ty Cooper. In 2018, he continued that work with a project grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation to map racist housing policies and the corresponding life outcomes for a forthcoming exhibit at the JSAAHC. He is a graduate of Charlottesville High School, earned his B.A. in Sanskrit, and his M.A. in Journalism from Boston University. For the last 12 years he has worked as a daily journalist, primarily in Washington D.C. and his hometown of Charlottesville, where he focuses on issues of race and equity.

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