People

Katrina Stack

Assistant Professor

Contact Information and CV

Office: SOC 291
Email: ksf13@usf.edu 
Curriculum Vitae

Education

PhD, Geography, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2025.

Teaching

As a public historian and cultural geographer, I approach communities, landscapes, and cultural institutions as vital spaces for learning. My courses emphasize hands-on, experiential, and community-engaged learning that invites students to consider how history is researched, preserved, interpreted, and communicated for and with diverse publics. Through projects involving archives, oral history, museums and exhibitions, historic preservation, digital history, and other forms of public interpretation, I encourage students to connect historical scholarship with the places, communities, and questions that matter to them. My goal is to help students develop practical skills in research, collaboration, ethical engagement, and public communication that prepare them for a wide range of careers and experiences in public history and related fields. I am also eager to mentor and supervise undergraduate and graduate student research in public history, historic preservation, cultural landscapes, memory and commemoration, and the histories and geographies of race and place.

Research

My research sits at the intersection of public history, Black geographies, historic preservation, and memory, with a particular interest in how Black communities make, preserve, and communicate their histories. My first book project examines the under-preserved Freedom Houses of the Mississippi Delta—homes and gathering spaces that supported Civil Rights Movement organizing and provided lodging, meeting spaces, and refuge for activists, often at considerable risk to the people who opened their doors. By tracing these sites during the movement alongside contemporary efforts to preserve and interpret them, I argue that Freedom Houses reveal pluralities of Black geographies of preservation and memory: the Black experience of the Civil Rights Movement was never monolithic, and neither are the ways that movement is remembered, valued, or preserved. This work asks whose histories and places become priorities within public history and historic preservation and emphasizes the importance of community knowledge, lived experience, and relationships to place in determining what—and how—we preserve.

My broader research extends these questions beyond traditional understandings of historic sites and archives. I draw on the archive of African American artist Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), a Knoxville, Tennessee-born abstract expressionist who spent the more than 25 years of his life in Paris, France alongside field research on Black tourism in the city of light. This work considers how archival materials, movement through place, memory, art, and lived experience can be brought together to conceptualize embodied archives and cartographies of Black life.

Across these projects, I approach public history not simply as the interpretation of an established past, but as a collaborative process of asking where history resides, whose knowledge constitutes historical evidence, and how relationships to place shape what is preserved and remembered. This spatial perspective foregrounds landscapes, homes, movement, and embodied experience as important sites of historical knowledge while emphasizing the role of communities in shaping the preservation and representation of their own histories.