Faculty Affiliates
About the Director
Jesse Bucher is Associate Professor of History, Founding Director of the Center for Studying Structures of Race, College Historian, and Coordinator of the African and African Diaspora Studies Concentration at Roanoke College. He has a PhD in African history from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities where he was a MacArthur Scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. Prior to arriving at Roanoke College in 2012, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at University of the Western Cape. Bucher’s research utilizes postcolonial and critical theory to interpret the history of political violence, colonialism, racial politics, and public memory in Tanzania, South Africa, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. He has worked extensively on projects related to histories of public commemoration, memorialization, and monuments. At Roanoke College he formed the Genealogy of Slavery project which documents the history of enslaved people in southwest Virginia, and led efforts to construct a permanent campus memorial in collaboration with Creative Time and the conceptual artist Sandy Williams IV. He regularly offers courses on the history of slavery, on African history, and on Black political movements throughout Africa and the African Diaspora. He can be reached at bucher@roanoke.edu.