Stumbling toward Repair: UVA, Charlottesville, and the process of coming to terms with the past and creating equity in the present

Our presenters will talk about their experiences with two UVA President’s commissions – the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University (PCSU – 2013-17) and the President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation (PCUAS -  2018 to the present). These two commissions now represent a 7 year endeavor by the University to come to terms with its role in America’s racial history and how that has played out in the local space of Charlottesville, Va. They will also speak to the actions that have been taken to begin to recon with these facts in UVA and the surrounding community since 2015/2016.

Guest Bios

Andrea Douglas, MBA, PhD
Executive Director, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center

Dr. Andrea Douglas, holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. in arts management and finance from Binghamton University, NY. She has also participated in the Getty’s Leadership Institute. Douglas was curator of collections and exhibitions and curator of contemporary art at the University of Virginia Art Museum from 2004-2010. She has been a Chair of the Charlottesville’s PLACE Design Task Force, a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race and Monuments, and the University of Virginia’s President’s Commission on Slavery at the University where she sat on their monument and community outreach committee. She presently is the co-chair of the President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation and sits on Monticello’s Advisory Committee on African American Affairs as well as serving as a member of  the Board of the Miller School of Albemarle. Douglas was recently one of a selection of contemporary activists in the Virginia Museum of History and Culture’s exhibition Agents of Change: Female Activism in Virginia from Women’s Suffrage to Today.

Kirt von Daacke, PhD
Assistant Dean and Professor in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia.

A historian, he has Co-Chaired the UVA President’s Commission on Slavery for the past seven years and now co-chairs the UVA President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation. Since 2016, he has been the managing director of Universities Studying Slavery, a UVA-led consortium of over seventy schools in five countries. His first book, Freedom Has a Face: Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson’s Virginia, came out in 2012. He co-authored both the 2018 President’s Commission on Slavery Report and the 2019 volume, Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University. He additionally currently co-leads “Jefferson’s University: The Early Life Project,” a major digital humanities initiative.