Join us for the 3rd annual Texas Edges Lecture Series featuring Dr. Andrea Roberts, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and an Associate Director of the Center for Housing & Urban Development at Texas A&M University. Dr. Roberts will present her work with the project Texas Freedom Colonies: Black Settlement Preservation as Freedom-Seeking.
Biography
Dr. Andrea Roberts is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and an Associate Director of the Center for Housing & Urban Development at Texas A&M University. Her 14 years’ experience in public administration and community development inform her efforts to move disappearing Black communities from the margin to the center of public discourse. She is the founder of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, a research & social justice initiative leveraging archival, spatial, participatory action research, and engaged ethnography. The Project’s flagship initiative, The Atlas, makes visible black placemaking heritage, disparate ecological and development impacts on Black communities through applied research that shapes policy and practice.
International Journal of E-Planning Research, The Journal of Planning History; Buildings and Landscapes. Forum Journal, the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, and Planning Theory & Practice have published her work. She is currently writing a book about Black historic preservation practice for The University of Texas Press.
Dr. Roberts holds a Ph.D. in community and regional planning at The University of Texas at Austin (2016). She is a 2020 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow. Her work has been recognized by The Vernacular Architecture Forum, the Urban Affairs Association, and Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, Abolition. She is a member of Texas’ State Board of Review, which advises Texas’ SHPO regarding National Register nominations.
