PhD Student Victoria Gum receives top award at W&M 2025 Graduate Research Symposium for “community-engaged, people-focused” research
In February, second-year Anthropology PhD student, Victoria Gum, received the William & Mary Interdisciplinary Award for Research Excellence at the annual Graduate Research Symposium. Presented by an interdisciplinary panel of William & Mary scholars, this the top award presented during GRS and carries a $2,000 prize.
Victoria presented her paper, entitled, “They Paved Paradise: Historic Preservation and Erasure at the First Baptist Church” during a special GRS session on Friday, February 28, 2025 from 1:30 – 3:00 p.m. in the Sadler Center, Tidewater A. Other participants in the session, which included both the presentations and an award ceremony, were the winners of the Graduate Studies Advisory Board Awards for Excellence in Scholarship.
After receiving her BA from William & Mary, Victoria spent several years working as an archaeologist at sites across Eastern Virginia, most recently at CW’s Custis Square and First Baptist Church sites. Before pursuing her PhD at William & Mary, Victoria received her MA from the department in 2023. Her award-winning paper is based on her master’s research which drew on her work as an archaeologist at Colonial Williamsburg, and specifically her experiences working at the First Baptist site, and interacting with both First Baptist community members and the visiting public.
In Victoria’s words, both her MA thesis and the GRS paper analyze the built museum landscape of the First Baptist Church site (c.1956-present), arguing that the landscape itself is the product of racist and nationalist values intrinsic to the early-to-mid-twentieth-century historic preservation movement of which Colonial Williamsburg was originally a product. In the 1950s, the 100-year-old church was torn down and the site was paved over as a parking lot, despite archaeological excavations locating dozens of graves in the area behind the church. Victoria’s work interrogates the 1950s archaeology project as a tool of erasure in the service of a historic preservation agenda targeted towards creating a whitewashed, traditionalist view of the past. She notes:
“I am honored to have been part of the more recent excavations (beginning 2020) at FBC, which were deeply engaged with the First Baptist Church community. The research questions and excavation protocols for this project were developed in collaboration with the community. The community also has a collaborative role in determining the way the site will be reconstructed and interpreted. The cemetery has already been marked with grave markers chosen by the community, and the reconstructed church is set to be finished and open to the public in 2026.”
Anthropology as a tool for not only investigating but also enacting social justice is a throughline in Victoria’s work. For her PhD research, she is transitioning to a focus on medical anthropology with an interest in reproductive healthcare including, “technologies like contraception and artificial reproductive technologies like IVF and embryo adoption.” She is still developing her dissertation project, but “looks forward to continuing community-engaged, people-focused research.”