Troubling Memories: A Lecture by historian Reiko Hillyer

Dr. Hillyer is a social and cultural historian of the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries, with specialties in the American South, African American history, the history of public memory, the built environment, and mass incarceration. She studies the history of the built environment, which means looking at physical space—from factories to theme parks—as a way of understanding historical processes.

Dr. Hillyer’s first book, Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory and Urban Space in the New South (University of Virginia Press, 2014), explored how tourism to the American South after the Civil War helped to foster a public memory of the war that helped to smooth sectional reconciliation, usher industrial capitalism, and legitimate Jim Crow.

Tonight, Dr. Hillyer will be speaking about "Troubling Memories: Race and Power on the American Landscape." This talk is sponsored by the History Department and the Science, Technology, Health & Society Program, and is partially funded by the NSF Grant "The History of Eugenics at Puget Sound and Beyond."