Katrina Stack is a public historian and cultural geographer whose interdisciplinary research examines the preservation and representation of Black history, with a particular focus on the Civil Rights Movement. She successfully defended her dissertation, From Freedom Houses to Tent Cities: Historic “Homes” and the Preservation of Civil Rights Memory, on December 9, 2025. In it, she examines overlooked sites of Black resistance and investigates how vernacular landscapes are preserved, interpreted, and narrated for public memory. Utilizing mixed qualitative methods, including archival research, documentary film analysis, discourse analysis, and oral histories, her research examines historic safe houses, temporary encampments, and community gathering sites in Tennessee, Alabama, and the Mississippi Delta.

She served as Graduate Research Fellow for the Beauford Delaney Papers at the University of Tennessee Libraries from 2023–2025, where she developed digital and physical exhibitions, enhanced archival metadata, conducted oral history interviews, and contributed to public programming and publications. An exhibition drawn from this collection, which she co-curated, is currently on display at the University of Tennessee’s Hodges Library. She wrote the accompanying exhibit album, Light Beyond the Canvas: Selections from the Beauford Delaney Papers, published by the University of Tennessee Press. This fellowship expanded her research on Black geographies and memory by examining traditional archives, commemorative plaques and walking tours as forms of embodied counter-mapping and archival practices that sustain Black memory beyond traditional preservation.

Katrina is a fellow with Tourism RESET, a multi-university interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to identifying and challenging social inequities in the tourism industry through research and public outreach. Through this work, she is laying the foundation for a collaborative, interdisciplinary research lab that provides students with training in digital curation, oral history, archival practices, and critical heritage studies, while fostering partnerships with museums, archives, and community organizations. The lab will advance innovative scholarship and model community-engaged, equity-driven research that bridges academia and professional practice.

COURSES TAUGHT
Teaching Associate (Instructor of Record)
GEOG 101 World Geography
GEOG 200 Environmental Issues in National Parks

Teaching Assistant
GEOG 101 World Geography
GEOG 121 Human Geography: People/Places
GEOG 206 Sustainability: Reducing our Impact on Planet Earth
GEOG 309 Geographies of Appalachia

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
Stack, Katrina. 2025. “Louvre Couture. Art and Fashion: Statement Pieces, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. Olivier Gabet, Curator. January 24, 2025-August 24, 2025.” The Public Historian 47, no 3: 173–177. https://doi-org.utk.idm.oclc.org/10.1525/tph.2025.47.3.173

Stack, Katrina, and Derek H. Alderman. 2024. “Tent City/Freedom City Geographies: Teaching Beyond the ‘Canon’ of Civil Rights Movement Memory.” The Geography Teacher 21, no. 1: 50–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/19338341.2024.2315533.

Stack, Katrina and Derek H. Alderman. 2024. “Visiting Contested Terrain: Archiving, Auditing, and Reforming Commemorative Place Names on US Marine Corps Bases.” GeoHumanities, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2024.2380668.

Stack, Katrina and Rebecca Sheehan. “Gettysburg tells the story of more than a battle − the military park shows what national ‘reconciliation’ looked like for decades after the Civil War.” The Conversation. November 17, 2023. https://doi.org/10.64628/AAI.uudccx5sm.