Kristan L. McCullum

Writer, Researcher & Preservationist based in New Orleans

Kristan L. McCullum is a writer, researcher, and preservationist based in New Orleans. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Kentucky, her master’s degree from Columbia University’s Teachers College, and her doctorate from the University of Virginia. While at UVA, she was a graduate research assistant with the Teachers in the Movement oral history project and the Center for Race and Public Education in the South. Before pursuing a PhD, she spent several years working as an educator in the Mississippi Delta. Her lived experiences in the Delta and Appalachia have inherently shaped her work, which uses oral history, memory, and a critical interrogation of the archive to tell fuller histories and stories about race, space, and place. She has worked on various public history projects that tell and preserve fuller stories and histories on the physical landscape. She has been involved in and helped to develop oral history projects in Virginia, Mississippi, and Kentucky, including her dissertation project that highlighted the lived experiences and memories of individuals who came of age in eastern Kentucky during the civil rights era. This work blends history and theory through a blues pedagogy to examine the educative nature of space in past, present, and future. Her writing has been published in History of Education Quarterly, Journal of Appalachian Studies, and Black Perspectives.