Public history alumna Tiffany Momon returns to campus as director of MTSU Center for Historic Preservation

Middle Tennessee State University alumna Tiffany Momon has returned to campus to lead the university’s Center for Historic Preservation, stepping into a role she once dreamed of holding.

“It’s such a good feeling that it’s me, the former graduate assistant, actually working here,” Momon said from her Peck Hall office, surrounded by history books and artifacts.

Momon succeeds longtime center director Carroll Van West, who retired earlier this year after leading the Center for Historic Preservation for three decades.

“With her demonstrated commitment to communities, students and the profession, Dr. Momon will accomplish wonderful things for Tennessee and the nation,” said West, who taught at MTSU for 41 years. “I can’t wait to see how her research and professionalism elevate the CHP to even greater heights.”

Momon’s path to the position was far from direct.

She graduated from Tennessee State University in 2007 with a degree in political science and plans to pursue a career in Washington, D.C. However, the beginning of the Great Recession changed those plans, and she eventually entered corporate America.

“I realized that I don’t actually like sitting at a desk for eight hours a day,” Momon joked.

After developing an interest in genealogy, she returned to school in 2012 and earned a second bachelor’s degree in African and African American Studies from the University of Memphis.

She later applied to MTSU’s public history master’s program. Soon after, then-MTSU history professor Pippa Holloway contacted her with an unexpected offer.

Holloway told Momon she noticed that she had applied but had not requested financial assistance and offered her an assistantship that included a monthly stipend and tuition coverage.

“I accepted and typed up my two weeks’ notice,” Momon recalled.

The transition back into the classroom was initially difficult, and Momon said she felt like a “fish out of water.”

That changed during her second semester at MTSU when she took a material culture course taught by West. The field examines objects, architecture and the ways people interact with material items.

“I realized I had found what I needed to be doing. I found the professor I needed to be working with and just like that, it clicked for me in that class. I found my spot,” Momon said.

She became especially interested in the book “Buying into the World of Goods,” which uses an old business ledger to explore the lives of people who shopped at a backcountry Virginia store.

Momon earned her master’s degree in public history from MTSU in 2016 before entering the university’s history doctoral program.

Her doctoral research focused on architecture at historically Black colleges and universities, as well as Rosenwald Schools, which were built for Black children across the segregated South during the Jim Crow era.

After earning her doctorate in 2019, Momon joined the University of the South in Sewanee, where she became a tenured associate professor of history. She taught public history courses and served as assistant director of the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race and Reconciliation, an initiative examining the university’s historical connections to enslavement.

That same year, Momon launched the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive, a student-driven project documenting the lives, labor and artistry of free and enslaved Black craftspeople in the American South from 1700 to 1900.

The archive’s traveling exhibition, “Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit of Independence,” opened in 2025 at the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, D.C., and is scheduled to continue traveling through 2028.

Momon also co-curated “Troubled Like the Restless Sea,” an installation at the Milwaukee Art Museum examining the connections between enslavement, colonialism and the trade of luxury decorative arts across the Atlantic.

Her work in Sewanee also led to a partnership with Tennessee State Parks and Hobart Akin, a cultural resources and exhibits specialist with the state parks system.

Momon and her students worked with Akin on an exhibit about convict leasing at what was then South Cumberland State Park, now Fiery Gizzard State Park, in Monteagle. The project combined archaeology, public history and historic artifacts to tell a difficult chapter in Tennessee history.

Akin said Momon has a unique ability to make challenging subjects more approachable.

“She’s somebody I always feel like I can just kind of talk to,” Akin said. He described her as down-to-earth and skilled at explaining complex topics in ways that encourage discussion.

“I was also impressed with how she worked with her students and talked them through telling the story,” he said.

As she begins her new role at MTSU, Momon hopes to help students develop the skills, professional relationships and networks needed to pursue careers in historic preservation and museums.

“One of the things that continues to inspire me the most are the students I meet because they remind you of why you do the work, and I’m so excited when I get to work with them and then they graduate, go off and you feel like a proud parent,” Momon said.

More information about the MTSU Center for Historic Preservation is available at mtsuhistpres.org.