Nicole Maurantonio

Research Fellow, She/Her/Hers

 Nicole Maurantonio, Ph.D. is Professor of Rhetoric & Communication Studies and American Studies at the University of Richmond, where she serves as Director of Advising, First-Year Seminar, and First- and Second-Year Programming. Her research, which explores narrative and material traces of memory, reflects her interdisciplinary interests and training in the fields of communication and history. Committed to excavating the relationships between memory and place, Nicole regularly teaches community-engaged courses tied to her scholarship that center inquiries into difficult and often contested histories. She is the recipient of the University of Richmond’s Distinguished Educator Award (2019), the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement’s Engage for Change! Award for Contribution to the Institution (2019), and co-founder of the University of Richmond’s Race & Racism Project. 

Expertise: Racism & Inequality, Enslavement & Heritage Tourism, Plantations, Race & Public Memory, Material Culture

Email: nmaurant@richmond.edu

Select Publications

Maurantonio, N. (2021). Remembering Columbus: Memory, Whiteness, and Italian American Identity in the American South. Diasporic Italy: Journal of the Italian American Studies Association 1 (1): 43-58.

 Maurantonio, N. (2021). Burning Karen’s Headquarters: Gender, Race, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Memory Studies, 14 (6): 1159-1172.

 Maurantonio, N. (2021). “Green Life Matters”: Place and the Politics of Environmental and Commemorative Justice. Communication, Culture, and Critique, 14 (1): 166-181. 

 Maurantonio, N. (2020, June 19). A Monumental Defeat. University Press of Kansas Blog.

 Maurantonio, N. (2019, December 19). Confederate Christmas ornaments are smaller than statues – but they send the same racist message. The Conversation. Reprinted in 35 media outlets, including The Washington Post and Houston Chronicle.

 Maurantonio, N. Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth and Memory in the Twenty-First Century (University Press of Kansas, Culture America Series, 2019).

 Maurantonio, N. (2018). Tarred by History: Memory, Materiality, and Protest. de arte, 53 (2-3): 51-69.