Heidi Kolk
associate professor, SAM FOX SCHOOL OF design & visual arts, and assistant Vice provost of academic assessment
Heidi Aronson Kolk teaches cultural history and is involved in graduate and undergraduate studies in visual and material culture. She began her academic training as an artist, and gravitates to mixed-methods research and teaching—in particular, modes that allow for creative engagement with narratives and material traces of the past. She served for ten years in a leadership role in Washington University's American Culture Studies program, where she maintains courtesy affiliation. She teaches courses on 19th and 20th-century history and culture; on collective memory and memorialization; consumerism and the culture of capitalism; and topics in the history of material and visual culture.
Professor Kolk’s research focuses on the politics of collective memory in the United States, and more specifically, the ways that cultural heritage comes to be materialized and given meaning in the modern urban landscape. Her first book, Taking Possession: Life, Death and the Politics of Memory in a St. Louis Town House (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), engages many of these themes, focusing on the material and symbolic lives, deaths, and rebirths of the Campbell House, a revered 1850s historic house in St. Louis that survived even as thousands of acres around it were allowed to deteriorate and eventually cleared in the name of urban renewal.
Her second book, What Still Remains (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press), probes the domain of “negative heritage”: sites considered problematic and disturbing, even shameful—desecrated burial grounds and mass graves; infamous ‘slum’ districts and failed public housing projects; and former prison sites and toxic-waste dumps. Building on more than a decade of fieldwork, it engages sites in St. Louis and New York—places considered by many as “unredeemable,” in material and social-political, as well as interpretative, senses, and consigned to oblivion. Yet these places have also inspired dark fixation and folklore, pilgrimage, and preservation, and more recently, historical reckoning and memory activism. Attending to their complex social-political dynamics and material histories, the book argues for negative heritage as a revelatory feature of American culture and identity.
This research has recently been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and has informed Heidi’s work on two other projects: as co-lead investigator on The Material World of Modern Segregation, a collaborative research project exploring the racialization of the material landscape of St. Louis; and as co-editor of Enduring Objects: Legacies of World War Two in Japanese American Art, Architecture, and Design (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic), which considers the decidedly positive heritage of art and design made by survivors of Japanese American incarceration.
Professor Kolk holds an MA and PhD in English and American Literature from Washington University in St. Louis, and a BA in fine arts from Hope College. She lives in St. Louis with her husband Joe and their three children, Dylan, Conrad and Everett. They attend Refresh Community Church.
Contact Heidi Kolk here.