Maggie Unverzagt Goddard

Maggie Unverzagt Goddard is an interdisciplinary scholar and practitioner whose writing on aesthetics and politics engages visual culture studies, public humanities and critical theories of the body. Her work focuses on the role of art and activism in reconfiguring sites of memorialization and using curatorial strategies to represent and navigate complex histories.

She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in History at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she co-directed the Public Humanities Lab at the Humanities Research Center. At VCU, she focused on the East Marshall Street Well Project, a community-led process for reconciliation and reparations to confront institutional failures and medical racism. In collaboration with the Family Representative Council, a group who stood for the descendant community, she worked to ensure appropriate study, memorialization and burial of human remains, uncovered in 1994 during the construction of a medical building, through oral histories, exhibitions, policy recommendations and curricular innovations.

With a background in education and curation, she previously worked and held fellowships at the Smithsonian, moCa Cleveland, Corcoran Gallery of Art and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities & Cultural Heritage. At Brown, she directed a workshop at the Cogut Institute funded by the Mellon Foundation, collaboratively coordinated the Royce Fellowship program and worked as a curatorial proctor at the David Winton Bell Gallery. Her research has been published in Women & Performance, The Journal of Popular Culture and Fwd: Museums, and received awards from the Popular Culture Association and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.