History PhD student receives "Graduate Student Paper Award" at Virginia Forum Conference

Tom Seabrook is a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Art History. On March 20, 2026, he presented the paper "Building the Backlash: Space, Race, and Memory in Charlottesville from Emancipation to Disfranchisement" at the Virginia Forum, held at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia. For this paper, Tom won the 2026 Virginia Forum Graduate Paper Award. The paper is a piece of his dissertation in progress, titled "Rigged Remembrance: Memory, White Supremacy, and the Built Environment in Charlottesville, Virginia, 1817-2017." This dissertation explores issues surrounding memory's impact on the physical landscape (and vice versa) in Charlottesville, the home of Thomas Jefferson and his University of Virginia (UVA). Tom traces the history of Charlottesville's buildings, monuments, and neighborhoods from the foundation of UVA in 1817 through the violent events of the Unite the Right rally in 2017. He argues that white supremacy's influence on the development of the city before the Civil War and during the Jim Crow era obscured the presence and voices of Charlottesville's African American population as late as the 2010s. His advisor is Dr. Jennifer Ritterhouse.