Andrea Roberts
Dr. Andrea Roberts is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning and Director of the School’s Center for Cultural Landscapes at the University of Virginia’s (UVA) School of Architecture. She founded The Texas Freedom Colonies Project to identify and map disappearing settlements in 2014, through which she and her team of students and volunteers have richly mapped 489+ settlements via the interactive Texas Freedom Colonies Project™ Atlas and Study, which spatializes sites’ histories, structures, and commemorative landscapes through participatory action research methods, including oral history interviews, counternarrative construction, and archival recovery. She has received awards for her engaged research methods and scholarship from The Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Urban Affairs Association. Roberts was a 2020-21 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow, an African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund grant recipient, and a 2020 Visiting Scholar at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, Abolition, and was Co-Project Director for the 2022 NEH Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty—"Towards a People's History of Landscape: Part 1: Black & Indigenous Histories of the Nation's Capital.” She is currently authoring a book, Never Sell the Land, about her experiences recording settlement origin stories and identifying Black planning and historic preservation practices that sustain cultural resilience within freedom colonies for The University of Texas Press.
