Welcome!

I am Assistant Professor of Digital and Public History at Florida Atlantic University. I earned my PhD in History at George Mason University and my Masters of Arts in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. I research ​the histories of cultural institutions, identity, memory, and ideas of belonging and power throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century American South. My research and teaching often incorporates public history and digital humanities methods such as digital mapping and oral history interviews.

My book manuscript in progress, Fighting Forgetting: Recovered Histories of Black Richmond, analyzes the dynamics between past community organizing, placemaking, and memory by recovering the largely unknown experiences and memories of African American residents displaced from a public and commemorative site in Richmond, Virginia called Chimborazo Park. I have held fellowships and worked as a Historical Consultant and Public Facilitator across a variety of public humanities institutions, including the National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg, and various nonprofit organizations. I teach courses in American history and digital and public history.

If you’d like to reach me, feel free to email me at lfretwell@fau.edu