Assistant Professor in the Sam Fox School of Design + Visual Arts; Assistant Vice Provost for Assessment

Heidi Aronson Kolk is a cultural historian who began academic life as a visual artist and poet, and pursued graduate study in literary and culture studies. Her research explores the politics and practices of memory in the United States, and engages creatively with the history and landscape of the American city. In this work she is especially attentive to issues of race and urban identity, disputes over public history and memory, and concepts of materiality and trauma. Her book Taking Possession: The Politics of Memory in a St. Louis Town House (2019, UMass Press) engages many of these themes, as does The Material World of Modern Segregation: St. Louis in the Long Era of Ferguson (2022, The Common Reader), a volume she co-edited with Iver Bernstein. 

 Beauty in Enormous Bleakness draws upon Kolk’s recent work on “negative heritage”—an under-theorized domain that includes material sites associated with shameful, problematic histories, or what are colloquially called “dark” episodes in the national past. These include the “camps” where Japanese Americans were “detained” during WWII—that is, places of forcible relocation, and mass incarceration, whose inherent violence has been (willfully) “forgotten,” disavowed, downplayed, if not actively denied or repressed. They also include “everyday” locations—places where the loss, survival, memory, and creativity of the interned were recorded, and whose significance might yet be reclaimed. Prior to pursuing these intellectual questions at WUSTL, in the early 2000s, Kolk worked for Richard Henmi at Henmi & Associates, where she was fortunate to hear Henmi’s accounts of his incarceration at Jerome Relocation Center, his time at WUSTL, his service as a U.S. Army GI, and his long career as a St. Louis-based architect responsible for many of the most recognized and beloved mid-century buildings in the region.