Author: Kate Wilson

I am an associate professor of history at Georgia State University, where I teach public history, oral history, material culture, and immigration/ethnic history. My research embraces immigration/ethnic studies, public history, oral history, urban studies, and material culture, to examine how power and place are mutually constitutive and how communities claim space in public historical narratives. My book, Ethnic Renewal in Philadelphia’s Chinatown: Space, Place and Struggle, was published by Temple University Press in 2015. A current project, Between Milltown and Model City: Race, Place, and Memory in Suburban Atlanta, explores how Blacks and whites imagined, crafted, maintained, and commemorated specific places over the course of the 20th century in two communities located east of the city of Atlanta: Scottdale and Avondale Estates. Both communities had their beginnings in the land-use transitions of the New South and were important spaces for experimentation and the realization of various spatial imaginaries—both Black and white—that transformed farmland to create new landscapes that would define the area for most of the next 100 years. At the intersection of urban studies, historic preservation, memory, critical race theory, and southern history, this project considers how we dwell in real, imagined, and remembered spaces, how communities preserve a sense of place amidst dramatic social and economic change, scarcity, or neglect, and how we live and remember through and with our shared but differential surroundings.