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More Than Monuments Course Overview

What is More than Monuments?
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Can monuments and preservation of the historic built environment help communities do more than just honor the past? Students in the course will answer this question while learning how professionals design,  preserve or plan commemorative sites and landscapes of memory in the built environment. Students will watch films, listen to lectures, read, and engage in service-learning, discussions, and visits to historical sites. These  experiences will teach students how historic preservation helps communities recover lost place histories,  strengthen democracy, and confront difficult pasts. The focus of the course will be the following contexts: memorial spaces, monuments, freedom colonies, schools, churches, lodges, and cemeteries. Students will  develop guidance and digital humanities tools and serve communities to honor people and moments in history,  right past wrongs, and resist erasure.

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About the Professor

Dr. Andrea Roberts is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University (TAMU). She will join the University of Virginia in Fall 2022 as an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning and is appointed Co-Director of the School’s Center for Cultural Landscapes. She is a scholar-activist who brings 12 years of experience in community development, nonprofit administration, and advocacy to her engaged research and public scholarship, which raises awareness of the entrenched racial biases impeding documentation, recognition, and preservation of historic Black settlements’ cultural assets. She is also a 6th-generation Texan and freedom colony descendant. 

About the Teaching Assistant

Jennifer Blanks is a Ph.D. candidate pursuing a doctoral degree in Urban and Regional Science at Texas A&M University. Jennifer identifies as an environmental planner; however, her other research interests include hazards and disasters, preservation planning, and Black geographies. Jennifer's dissertation project builds upon existing literature that offers best practices for African American participatory preservation methods, theories, and approaches to provide perpetual care for ancestral burial grounds and other memorialized landscapes. She served as the teaching assistant for the More than Monuments course and assisted students throughout the duration of the project. Specifically, Jennifer created the headstone assessment tool and taught students to identify various hazards and conditions of individual burial plots found within the study site. 
 

Teams

Team 1: Media Curation

  • Lauren Kasel

  • Leslie Contreras

  • Kaylin Slaughter

  • Zachary Hart

  • Reed Way

Team 2: Centerline Cemetery Headstone Assessment 

  • Leo LeFebre

  • Quade Clark

  • Candace Noonan

  • Jose Zapata

  • Gavin Mejia​

Team 3: Record Sweet Home Church and Centerline Cemetery Oral History

  • Christina Camarillo

  • Kenneth Alexander

  • Mace Bristow

  • Tanner Robertson

  • Mark Perez

Team 4: Dabney Hill Cultural Landscape Assessment 

  • Zach Cochran

  • Ashley Dinhobl

  • Clay Rhynes

  • Oscar Trevino

  • David Joe

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