Heidi Aronson Kolk

Heidi Aronson Kolk is a cultural historian who began academic life as a visual artist and poet, pursued graduate study in literary history and American culture studies, and now teaches in the Sam Fox School’s College of Art, where she a member of the core faculty in the MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture program. 

Kolk’s research explores the material and cultural politics of public memory in the United States, engaging creatively with the history and landscape of the American city.  She is especially attentive to issues of race and cultural heritage, concepts of materiality and trauma, and disputes over public space and memorialization.  Her first book, “Taking Possession: Life, Death and the Politics of Memory in a St. Louis Town House” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), considers many of these subjects. It interrogates efforts to preserve the long-time residence of St. Louis fur-trader-turned-mercantile-tycoon Robert Campbell during a period of radical transformation, as historic neighborhoods across the city subjected to racialized urban “renewal.”

Kolk’s current book project, “What Still Remains” (under contract with University of Chicago Press), probes America’s fraught relationship to “negative heritage”: sites, objects, and remnant landscapes associated with unusually painful or problematic histories, and that inspire regret, sorrow or shame. Many have come to be seen as “unredeemable,” in material, social-political, and interpretative senses, and consigned to oblivion. But others have inspired dark fixation and folklore, pilgrimage, and preservation, and more recently, historical reckoning and memory activism. Attending to the complex dynamics and histories of several such sites in two major U.S. cities (St. Louis and New York), the book argues that negative heritage represents an especially revelatory feature of American public life and culture.

This research has informed Kolk’s work in other areas, including:

• “The Material World of Modern Segregation”, which uncovers the long racial histories of sites of segregation across the St. Louis region. (An associated essay collection (2022), which Kolk co-edited with Iver Bernstein, is now being taught in courses across the university and beyond.  Phase II of the project launched in 2025 with a symposium, and a second volume is forthcoming in 2026-2027.)

• “Beyond the Bunkers: Excavating the Twentieth Century at Tyson Research Center,” a collaborative research initiative involving Tyson Research Center, the Center for Humanities, and WashU Libraries, which received an Ignite Interdisciplinary Grant from the Office of the Provost in 2025.

Kolk is also co-lead-investigator, with Kelley Van Dyck Murphy, of “Beauty in Enormous Bleakness: The Design Legacy of the Interned Generation of Japanese Americans” (BIEB). This grant-supported initiative explores architecture’s relationship to issues of immigration, exclusion, and cultural identity in 20th-century American life, focusing on the design legacies of the mass-incarceration of individuals of Japanese descent during World War II.  

Initial findings were showcased in a multimedia exhibition and a symposium (both in 2021). They have since inspired a travel-study course called DISLOCATED: Memory, Forgetting, and the Landscapes of Japanese American Incarceration (2025), and a public arts installation, “Made in St. Louis: Japanese American Design at Mid-Century” (to open at Lambert International Airport in late 2025). Kolk and Murphy are also co-editing a book, “Enduring Objects: Legacies of World War Two in Japanese American Art, Architecture, and Design” (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Publishing).