Heidi Aronson Kolk

Heidi Aronson Kolk is a cultural historian whose research and teaching focuses on American material and visual culture, space and place, cultural heritage, and the politics of memory. She is author of a forthcoming book, Taking Possession: Life, Death and the Politics of Memory in a St. Louis Town House (2019, University of Massachusetts Press) and serves as Assistant Professor in the Sam Fox School of Design + Visual Arts, and also Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Assessment, both at Washington University in St. Louis.

Posts by Heidi Aronson Kolk

This Home is Not For Sale

Like St. Louis Place as a whole—a neighborhood so beleaguered and yet so beloved—the grassy lot at the 2300 block of Mullanphy on the near side of North St. Louis manifests many characteristics that can also be found in other predominantly Black neighborhoods across the St. Louis region, from the Ville to Howard-Evans Place to Kinloch, each of which has been subjected to threats from those who would seek to extract their value and expunge their negative associations. At this particular site, the negative and positive have become fatefully entangled, and yet residents have found ways to express its emancipation-heritage significance.

Page by Page: Book Reviews, Reviews

Tea as Cultural Commodity

A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World explores tea as a global commodity whose history has been shaped by the transformations of capitalism and the regimes of empire and nationalism—the very forces, we might say, that have given us Starbucks.