Ariel Seay-Howard

Bio

Dr. Ariel E. Seay-Howard is a rhetoric scholar who investigates how the public remembers slavery and racial violence through memory spaces and material objects. Her research agenda is motivated by the desire to understand how racial violence has and continues to impact marginalized communities.  She examines how new modes of commemoration, lynching memorials, former slave plantations, now museums and documentary films operate as counter-memories that help the public remember racial violence differently than the sanitized white narrative typically remembered. In exploring these new approaches to remembering, she hopes to create a new paradigm for recalling this violent history, encourage communities to heal from this violence, and illuminate ways to transform how we discuss the past, present and future.