Undergraduate Research Reports: McKenzie Diep on the Bottomlands

We're so pleased to provide undergraduate research opportunities! McKenzie Diep worked with Maria Pettis on Bottomlands: Mapping Black Cemeteries in the Mid-South, a project addressing pending erasures of place, memory, and sites of meaning by archiving and constructing a public database of traces, scattered across material, mnemonic, and digital archives. From McKenzie:

The Bottomlands project was a great opportunity for me to play a role in preserving the familial history and burial places of enslaved Black people in the Mississippi Delta. I was able to use archival, spatial, and historical data to create a novel database of Black, white, and Japanese cemeteries in various counties. I am grateful to learn from my mentor Maria and to work on an impactful project, and I will be continuing to work with her on this project in the summer!