Savannah Grandey Knies

Fieldwork Coordinator at the Center for Historic Preservation

savannah.grandey@mtsu.edu

Savannah Grandey Knies leads many of the Center’s major field projects and specializes in nominating historic resources to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), a federal list of places deemed worthy of preservation. In this capacity, Knies has worked on more than twenty-two successful NRHP designations across Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and New Mexico. She also provides support to the Center’s National Historic Trails Program and carries out public interpretation projects, including exhibits, brochures, and historical markers, for cultural and historical institutions across the state. 

Knies received her M.A. in Public History from MTSU in 2014. Her thesis used mid-20th-century photography to analyze the rural landscape of the New Deal and the constant evolution of those landscapes. Her research interests include progressive and New Deal-era agriculture, the impact of the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board on Tennessee’s segregated school system, and the preservation of historically segregated places.