Charlotte SOA Lecture: Reiko Hillyer March 15

March 15, 2024 – 2:00 PM

Boardman Auditorium/Storrs 110

Reiko Hillyer is an Associate Professor of History and Department Chair, Director of Ethnic Studies at Lewis & Clark College. She has a BA in Political Science, Yale University, 1991 and a PhD in History, Columbia University, 2007. Her specialty is U.S. South, African American History, the built environment, and prison studies. Her research in this topic is related to and informs her teaching.

Her first book, Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory and Urban Space in the New South (University of Virginia Press, 2014), explores how tourism to the American South after the Civil War helped to foster a public memory of the war that would help smooth sectional reconciliation, usher industrial capitalism, and legitimate Jim Crow.

She has published scholarly work on the civil rights movement and public memory, community policing in New York City, and prison litigation in Virginia for journals such as the Journal of Southern History, The Journal of Urban History, and the Journal of Civil and Human Rights. Influenced by my her teaching in the Inside-Out program, she is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled: “A Wall is Just a Wall”: The Permeability of the Prison in 20th Century America, which traces the decline of practices that used to connect incarcerated people more regularly to the free world.

Her research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, The Vital Projects Fund, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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