Tiffany Momon, Ph.D.

Director of the Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University

tiffany.momon@mtsu.edu

Dr. Tiffany Momon is the Director of the Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University, a role she began in 2026 following Dr. Carroll Van West’s retirement after decades of leadership. She leads the Center in its long-standing traditions of community-driven preservation and student success while charting new directions in research, public engagement, and digital scholarship. Momon’s ties to the Center predate her appointment as Director. She earned her M.A. at MTSU before joining the Center as a graduate assistant from 2016 to 2019 while completing her Ph.D., gaining hands-on experience in the work that continues to define the center. 

A scholar, curator, and public historian, Momon’s research centers on the experiences of Black craftspeople and their contributions to the decorative arts, architecture, and material culture of the early American South. She is the founder and co-director of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive (blackcraftspeople.org), a digital humanities project that explores the lives and labor of enslaved and free Black artisans through archival sources, including runaway advertisements, estate inventories, and probate records. 

Momon’s scholarship translates directly into preservation practice and museum exhibitions. Her early research on Historically Black Colleges and Universities led her to successfully nominate several such properties to the National Register of Historic Places. Her exhibitions include Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit of Independence, which opened at the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, D.C., in spring 2025, and Troubled Like the Restless Sea, currently on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum. 

Momon has lectured widely on these subjects, delivering keynotes and invited addresses at some of the nation’s leading art and history museums and universities, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Colonial Williamsburg, the Georgia Museum of Art, Clemson University, the University of Alabama, and the National Council on Public History, among others. 

Momon has published widely in southern history, architecture, and material culture. Her most recent work is Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit of Independence (University of North Carolina Press, 2025). Other publications include chapters in edited volumes including Architectures of Slavery: Ruins and Reconstructions (University of Virginia Press, 2025), The Politics of Global Craft (Bloomsbury Press, 2025), Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art (Brooklyn Museum Press, 2025), A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects (Princeton University Press, 2025), and Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change (Bloomsbury Press, 2023).