Liz Foshe

Liz Foshe is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at George Washington University.  Her current research centers on cultural memory in the American South. She is particularly interested in how memory not only regulates the social boundaries between segregated communities, but also how memory can maintain, enforce, or challenge the material and physical conditions that define segregation.  Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Remembering the Lenox Theater,” draws on conversations with locals in Augusta to recover the legacy of the Lenox Theater as the cultural heart and epicenter of the business district. By documenting the local memories surrounding the theater, it’s loss, and its recent recovery in the city’s historical narrative, Liz hopes to demonstrate how the way a community remembers (or forgets) its history shapes what is possible within that community’s social and material environment. Liz’s research provokes the question as to not just how this once “golden” block lost it’s luster, but how the maintained vacancy of the businesses that once flourished here continue to shape and inform the racial politics of today’s Augusta.