In February, as part of the annual UA Graduate Conference on Power & Struggle, graduate students and faculty welcomed invited keynote speaker Dr. Tiffany Momon, Assistant Professor of History at Sewanee: The University of the South, to address the growth and significance of Public History in our discipline.

Momon has conducted architectural surveys on eight of Alabama’s nine historically black colleges and universities for the National Park Service and she has worked with graduate students to complete numerous National Register of Historic Places nominations, including one for Stillman College. She also provides consulting services to museums, such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Memphis’s National Civil Rights Museum.

Her lecture, titled “Confronting the Past: Power and Struggle in Public History,” focused on the different ways in which Dr. Momon has engaged with Public History during the last decade: as a student, professor, researcher, and community advocate.

This day-long event served to take the place of the 2020 conference (at which Dr. Momon was originally slated to speak), which was postponed as result of the COVID-19 Pandemic, and provided both a lecture opportunity open to the public and a luncheon with Dr. Momon exclusively for graduate students.