Arts & Sciences Magazine

By Michael S. Goldberg

To Carolyn White, a walk on BU’s Charles River campus means confronting juxtaposed layers of living history. Look: a 19th-century brick townhouse on Bay State Road that speaks to the Back Bay neighborhood’s emergence. There, looming above, the 19-story Jenga building, a jagged stack of glass and steel blocks, built in 2022, that’s home to the Boston University Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences.

“One [building] speaks about one time period, and one speaks about another. But we are living in those spaces and they form the world,” says White (GRS’02), a professor of history of art and architecture and director of the Preservation Studies Program. 

An archaeologist and anthropologist, White sees the material evidence of lives worth examining everywhere. She has examined artifacts in a Depression-era mining town in Nevada. And she has pored over the traces of 21st century temporary communities like the Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and a tent city for refugees in Rome. 

With such a wide-angle view, it’s not surprising to hear White talk about the timestamps of different eras converging, and the physical signs they show us. It is this idea—how the material evidence people leave behind informs our world—that animates White’s work as a scholar and teacher.

“I really love that kind of moving back and forth in time,” she says. “It helps you understand both time periods much better, and it makes the past more relevant to the present.”

Understanding the lives of people not covered in history books

White’s interests have long been interdisciplinary and finding how fields intersect and complement each other drives her sense of discovery. 

She can chart her rising attraction to archaeology through a handful of experiences. On a visit to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Charlottesville, Va., she saw people excavating the cabins of enslaved people. As an archaeological studies major at Oberlin College, she read about the diets of those same people. “I was really struck by these two things coming together, of understanding the lives of enslaved people in a place where their histories were not written, and what you could glean from the archaeological remains,” she says.

Then White attended the BU Archaeological Field School, where she did field work with the late Mary Beaudry, a professor of archaeology and anthropology, at the Spencer Peirce Little Farm, a 17th century National Historic Landmark in Newbury, Mass. There she enjoyed touching pieces of the past, studying maps of the house and the history of its occupants, detailing the locations of artifacts outside of the house’s scullery, and imagining the work people did there. Working outdoors was also a plus, she says. 

The experience sealed her choice to study at BU, where Beaudry was her advisor.

 Her return at the start of 2025, after two decades on the faculty at the University of Nevada, Reno, represents a “full-circle moment,” she says.

Making meaning of life’s materials, through the centuries

At BU, White works within multiple disciplines, including history, architecture, archaeology, anthropology, cultural geography, and American studies. Applying these lenses to the world leads to her studying what she calls “the materiality of daily life” and how the past juxtaposes with the present.

“We don’t think that much about, say, making a cup of coffee in the morning. But the way we do that in 2025 is radically different than the way people did it back in 1825 or 1925 and that tells us a lot, not just about how that individual person lived, but what the availability of different technology might be, how their race, class, gender, ethnicity might be impacting the choices that they make,” she says. “I’m interested in both how it works today, and also how it worked before. And what that tells us about the kinds of structures of how people live.”

This thinking informs White’s approach to leading the Preservation Studies Program. At its core, preservationists conduct a conversation about the past with our future, protecting landscapes and buildings along with signs of cultural heritage, whether at an archaeological site or a historic house. 

She wants students—future preservation professionals—to understand the place that the present holds in relationship to the past. Like a walk on Bay State Road.

“One of the reasons why I bring up that Jenga building, is that I think that there is an interest in seeing the past alongside the present,” she says. “You don’t want to put any city, any space, in amber. We recognize that change happens and that some buildings will be preserved for a very long time. Others will not.”

Boston, with its rich history, gives the Preservation Studies Program a fertile base of operations. White says she wants to maintain the strong New England-based community of professionals who offer students fieldwork opportunities. She also hopes to expand those opportunities by building connections with professionals further afield, including internationally.

It is not lost on White that she has begun her BU tenure at a time when the Trump Administration is cutting government funding for cultural preservation, including in the National Park Service budget. In her teaching, White and her students pore over laws on environmental protection, historic preservation, and Native American grave protection and repatriation. The goal is to equip students with an understanding of the discretion that officials at various levels—including local historic commissions—may choose to apply to sites of interest. The exercise has taken on an urgent tone given changes in Washington.

“We are in danger of trimming to the bone these agencies that have worked very hard, quite successfully, to protect our landscapes and our cultural heritage. There are reasons why these laws are in action because they are protecting things that were under threat. And I do really worry that the threats are real and our heritage is at risk,” White says.

Recording moments in time

In her recent work, White has focused on studying temporary spaces. One example is her book The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City (University of New Mexico Press, 2022), about the annual festival where a city for 70,000 people is built and deconstructed in the desert. Another is a camp settlement on Rome’s outskirts for asylum seekers from North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. 

In “The Future Absence of a Tent City” in the journal Places, White and her partner, the photographer Steven Seidenberg, chronicle the camp’s three-year life. White relied on her experience as an archeologist and anthropologist as they visited the camp’s different sites, noting how people constructed living spaces, interviewing residents about their lives and the volunteers who supported them. 

Called the Baobab Experience, the camp provided temporary shelter for up to 800 people for brief stays on their way to other countries. The camp faced more than 20 evictions and relocated each time. In 2018, the city bulldozed its last location, a parking lot on Rome’s edge.

White says recording the camp provided an important opportunity to apply research techniques to a pressing, relevant issue. What she found demonstrated the pressures on migrants, forced by climate change and other circumstances to seek new homes; the impacts on an under-resourced city; the role of volunteers who sought to help the refugees; how European Union law forced migrants to return to their country of entry (in this case Italy); and how city authorities forced refugees to move before, ultimately, bulldozing the camp. 

At the same time, White and Seidenberg recorded how people created homes for their families, with beds and tables and chairs, with food cupboards and cooking equipment and children’s toys.

“This could be the spaces of anyone,” White says. “It could be you, it could be your family, it could be someone you know. You see that people are trying to live in as respectable a way as they possibly can and make the best of their situation.”