Kathleen Powers Conti

As a public historian and preservation professional, Kathleen Powers Conti consults on projects across the US and is an assistant professor of history at Florida State University. Her research spans across the Americas and the former Soviet Union, focusing on how to preserve and interpret places of “difficult heritage”—sites of trauma, contested history, or atrocities. She’s published several book chapters, including in Revisiting the Past in Museums and Historic Sites and Architectures of Slavery: Ruins & Reconstructions and is currently writing her first book project, “Tell It Like It Was”: Race, Memory, and Historic Preservation in the American South. Kathleen’s research has been supported by the U.S. Department of Education, the National Park Service, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Association for Preservation Technology, the Society for Architectural Historians, Dumbarton Oaks, PEO International, and the Mellon Urban Initiative.

She frequently consults for the National Park Service, such as developing new treatment options to protect cultural landscapes at risk of disasters resulting from climate change or developing new interpretation for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birth home and Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. In light of her work, the President of the National Council on Public History appointed her as Co-chair for their consultants committee to develop guidelines for “Best Practices for Consulting Historians.”