Full Name
Andrea Roberts
Company
University of Virginia
Speaking At
Speaker Bio
Dr. Andrea Roberts is a Black activist, educator, and scholar of cultural landscape histories and placemaking practices in the Americas, as well as a descendant of the founders of historic Black places established by the formerly enslaved in Texas. Her 12 years of professional experience in housing, government, and advocacy inform her scholarly efforts to bring marginalized, historic Black communities to the center of planning and research. She is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, where she also serves as Faculty Director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes (CCL) and is an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Architectural History and the Woodson Institute. Her peer-reviewed and public scholarship on Black placemaking and placekeeping frames these concepts as part of a long tradition of resistance and freedom-seeking in the Americas.
She created The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas and Grassroots Preservation Study in 2014 to identify and map disappearing settlements and their historic properties through participatory heritage conservation and community storytelling. The Project has become a vehicle through which students, advocates, and volunteers record locations and stories about 533 Black settlements in the state. Under the auspices of the CCL, she now leads the Mellon Foundation-supported Outsider Preservation Initiative, which will expand The Project beyond Texas to support projects in Virginia, California, and Canada. She is the author of Never Sell the Land: Place Persistence as Resistance, about her experiences recording place origin stories and grassroots Black preservation practices that sustain cultural resilience forthcoming from The University of Texas Press.
Planners and researchers throughout the US have applied her approaches to challenge the invisibility of Black settlements and to promote recognition. She has received awards and fellowships for her engaged research methods and scholarship and serves on various boards and research teams. Dr. Roberts was Co-Project Director for the 2022 and 2024 NEH Summer Institutes for Higher Education Faculty—"Towards a People's History of Landscape: Black & Indigenous Histories.” Dr. Roberts served on PolicyLink’s Spatial Futures Fellowship Advisory Committee and the Urban Landscape Studies Advisory Board at Dumbarton Oaks and is a steering committee member for the Black Experiences with Planning in Canada partnership and research study. Dr. Roberts is an advisory council member of the Oatlands National Trust for Historic Preservation Site. She supports the Aya Symposium, an annual Texas Freedom Colonies conference created for and by descendants. Dr. Roberts holds a Ph.D. in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin (2016), an M.A. in Government Administration and Public Finance from the University of Pennsylvania (2006), and a B.A. in Political Science from Vassar College (1996).
She created The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas and Grassroots Preservation Study in 2014 to identify and map disappearing settlements and their historic properties through participatory heritage conservation and community storytelling. The Project has become a vehicle through which students, advocates, and volunteers record locations and stories about 533 Black settlements in the state. Under the auspices of the CCL, she now leads the Mellon Foundation-supported Outsider Preservation Initiative, which will expand The Project beyond Texas to support projects in Virginia, California, and Canada. She is the author of Never Sell the Land: Place Persistence as Resistance, about her experiences recording place origin stories and grassroots Black preservation practices that sustain cultural resilience forthcoming from The University of Texas Press.
Planners and researchers throughout the US have applied her approaches to challenge the invisibility of Black settlements and to promote recognition. She has received awards and fellowships for her engaged research methods and scholarship and serves on various boards and research teams. Dr. Roberts was Co-Project Director for the 2022 and 2024 NEH Summer Institutes for Higher Education Faculty—"Towards a People's History of Landscape: Black & Indigenous Histories.” Dr. Roberts served on PolicyLink’s Spatial Futures Fellowship Advisory Committee and the Urban Landscape Studies Advisory Board at Dumbarton Oaks and is a steering committee member for the Black Experiences with Planning in Canada partnership and research study. Dr. Roberts is an advisory council member of the Oatlands National Trust for Historic Preservation Site. She supports the Aya Symposium, an annual Texas Freedom Colonies conference created for and by descendants. Dr. Roberts holds a Ph.D. in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin (2016), an M.A. in Government Administration and Public Finance from the University of Pennsylvania (2006), and a B.A. in Political Science from Vassar College (1996).
