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Jessica Hanson, Ph.D., is a public historian and educator who serves as archivist at Meharry Medical College, founded in 1876 as the Medical Department of Central Tennessee College and established as the first medical school in the South for Black Americans. She also serves as a contracted Public History researcher, author, and editor with the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project. Jessica earned her Ph.D. in Public History from Middle Tennessee State University, where she specialized in historic preservation, oral history, and material culture. Her dissertation honors Black women from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries who continue preserving their often underrepresented and historically marginalized communities and landscapes through both academic and grassroots public history, placemaking, and placekeeping, with particular attention to sites associated with author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Jessica intends to further this research and these community collaborations through a future manuscript and documentary. Beyond her professional work, she is a devoted floraphile, spends time with her fur-sons: Chaos, Boots, and Peter, enjoys traveling, reading, usually with history research somehow finding its way into the mix, spending time in nature, and exploring museums, archives, and cultural heritage sites.
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