PhD in History

Laura Brannan Fretwell, 2025

Describe your current area of research and/or your academic interests.

I am a historian of the modern American South, specializing in memory studies, public history, women's and gender studies, African American history, and digital humanities. My dissertation research focuses on the cultural “buried” and untold histories of Richmond, Virginia’s Chimborazo Park over time. I especially use it as a case study to examine larger issues over race, constructions of space, and commemoration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the U.S. Today, Chimborazo Park hosts the “Chimborazo Medical Museum,” which exhibits the history of a Confederate hospital that was once on site during the Civil War.

My project offers a new interpretation of the site through an explicitly inclusionary framework: I argue Chimborazo Park occludes significant “buried histories” about the Black community of over 1,000 people that once lived and worshipped on site after the war. Through engaging with descendants of the former neighborhood in conducting oral history interviews and mapping demographic data, my project recovers these communal histories and argues that the case of Chimborazo Hill connects to national discourses about race, memory, and space which dominate the political landscape today.

Why did you choose George Mason to pursue your studies?

I chose George Mason University because of its collaborative and collegial environment seen throughout the engagement between graduate and undergraduate students, faculty and staff, and multiple humanities research centers. I have been grateful to learn from such vibrant intellectual communities at George Mason, including when I served as a predoctoral Fellow at both the Center for Humanities Research and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.

Are there faculty or staff members who have made a difference thus far during your Mason career? 

I have learned a tremendous amount from my advisor Alison Landsberg, professor of History and Cultural Studies and outgoing director of CHR. Alison strongly supports my intellectual commitments to engaging with historically marginalized communities, and always provides insightful feedback that strengthens my research. I am very grateful for her continued support of my work.

How do you hope to use your degree and studies in the future?

I hope to either teach American history at an academic institution or research at a digital humanities center or museum. Higher education and museums both promote the study of the past to reveal new insights into the present; thus, working in either setting fulfills my career goals and research interests.

How will the Dean’s Challenge scholarship support your studies?

The Dean’s Challenge Award will provide funds towards my personal educational expenses and living costs, which would free up my time and allow me to continue engaging with public communities through visiting local stakeholders in Richmond. The scholarship will support a history dissertation project that intentionally seeks to restore justice beyond traditional forms of academic publication through community engagement including the practice of oral histories, digitizing local records of Fourth Baptist Church, a historically marginalized institution, and providing research to future public-facing exhibition panels at Chimborazo Park.