Graduate Student Speaker Series Continues With Katie Powell

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Katie Powell

Join the University Libraries and Graduate School and International Education at noon Tuesday, Sept. 29, for a Zoom presentation with doctoral candidate Katie Powell. 

Powell will present "The Fight for Home and Fatherland: a look inside the women of the James H. Berry chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy." This event is open to the public and offered at no cost to attendees. 

Powell is a graduate student in the Rhetoric and Composition Program within the Department of English, as well as the associate director of student success with the University of Arkansas Honors College.

Her research focuses on the ways in which communities remember, including "the problematic remnants of a community's history such as confederate monuments and memorials." 

"A white southerner myself, I am writing to understand the ways in which we perpetuate histories that a white community doesn't want remembered yet cannot forget," she said.

As part of her dissertation, Powell explores the ways in which communities remember, including what a community chooses not to remember.

In this presentation, she'll cover her work diving into the Berry, Dickinson, and Peel family papers, three prominent Bentonville families at the turn of the century. From official documentation such as certificates and meeting minutes to ephemeral artifacts such as letters and photos, the women of these Bentonville families were foundational to a Confederate memory that remains tied to the community today.