As part of his 2024–2025 Virginia Humanities Public Humanities Fellowship, Dr. Donovan Schaefer is digging deep into the emotional and political power of Confederate monuments in Virginia. His project, Forging Feeling: Race, Emotion, and Confederate Commemoration in Virginia, blends archival research, public storytelling, and a growing digital archive spotlighting Black press responses to Confederate symbols.
In this Q&A, Schaefer reflects on what these monuments mean, why emotions are central to public memory, and how his work aims to reshape conversations about race, history, and belonging — both in Virginia and far beyond.
What drew you to focus on the emotional politics of Confederate monuments in Virginia, and why now?
Donovan Schaefer: Monuments are a major political flashpoint today. Not just in the U.S., but all over the world. I lived in England from 2014 to 2017 and watched a controversy play out there around statues of colonial masterminds like Cecil Rhodes. A movement had started in South Africa dedicated to removing those statues called “Rhodes Must Fall.” The movement spread to the U.K., where some statues began to be criticized and removed, sometimes through mass action.
I was fascinated by those criticisms, but also by the intensity of the reactions to the criticisms. Incredibly nasty things were being said about the students involved in the Rhodes Must Fall movement, and I came to realize that the fascination people have with statues goes far beyond what you might expect if you see them just as a kind of public decoration.
I moved back to the U.S. in August 2017, a few weeks before the Unite the Right riot in Charlottesville, where Heather Heyer was murdered by a white supremacist who drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. The Unite the Right event was triggered by the Charlottesville City Council’s decision to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee in the Court Square district. A white supremacist named Richard Spencer had attended UVA and knew Charlottesville well. So, monuments really matter to people. They are silent, but they shape our politics in all kinds of ways. People kill for them. People die for them. And my argument is that this is fundamentally about emotion.
Your project centers on Richmond, Charlottesville, and Lexington. What makes these cities key sites for understanding Confederate commemoration?
DS: Richmond is crucial because it was the Confederate capital, and ground zero for Confederate commemoration. Over the course of the post-Reconstruction period and into the Jim Crow era, a network of cemeteries, monuments, and museums were erected across the city. Richmond has also been extremely effective about removing its monuments, producing some of the most interesting and important images from 2020 to 2021, a period of major monument removal — like the Lee monument transformed into a symbol of resistance or the defaced Davis monument put on display at the Valentine museum.
Charlottesville is the scene of the Unite the Right riot, which contributed heavily to our collective realization of how powerful a force Confederation commemoration had become in shaping our society, even in the late 2010s. As the site of so much commemoration of Jefferson — a philosopher of freedom who enslaved human beings on the basis of race — Charlottesville is also a place where some of the paradoxes of American society around race really take root.
Robert E. Lee is buried in Lexington, at Washington and Lee University, where he ended his career after the close of the Civil War. Lee’s tomb is located in the University Chapel, in a space typically reserved for an altar. And it’s still there — the University’s response to the past decade’s controversies has been to place a partition blocking the line of sight from the pews to the sarcophagus. But that’s triggered a firestorm of reaction from some alumni, who think the university is insufficiently deferential to Lee. Jackson is also buried in Lexington, in a cemetery half a mile from campus. The statue over Jackson’s grave is still standing, too.
You describe monuments as doing political and emotional work in public space. What does that mean in practice?
DS: A lot of my previous work has been about the importance of emotion. Many people think emotion doesn’t really matter for politics — or that it shouldn’t matter, and that anyone they disagree with is “just being emotional.” It’s a bipartisan problem, and it’s ridiculous. I would say the only thing that ever really matters to anyone is emotion, so when someone accuses the other side of being “emotional,” they’re really saying “the way I feel about this situation is more important than the way you feel about this situation.”
Monuments are powerful emotional artifacts. They define the emotional landscape of the locales where they’re planted. They send powerful messages about who belongs in a particular space — and to whom that space belongs. So, I see all of the debates about monuments as real fights about what kind of society we live in. And that’s fundamentally about how place feels to the people who live there.
Tomb of Robert E. Lee at Washington & Lee University in Lexington Stonewall Jackson Monument in Lexington
The “False Image of History” website highlights Black press responses to Confederate symbols. What have you learned from those voices?
DS: There’s a lot of misinformation about the history of Confederate monuments out there. Some of this is historical ignorance. Some of it is willful propaganda. One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that concerns about Confederate commemoration are new. That’s dead wrong.
My research students Olivia Haynie and Justin Seward built a database of responses to Confederate commemoration from the Black press going back to the 1870s. Already within a decade of the end of the Civil War, Black journalists were documenting the rise of reverential behavior toward the Confederacy by the old white supremacist power structure. They knew exactly where it was going. The KKK, for instance, was always plugged in to sites of Confederate commemoration. We built False Image of History to make sure people got the story straight about how this has been a serious problem for literally a century and a half.
How do you approach translating complex scholarship into public talks, digital platforms, and writing for broad audiences?
DS: I think a lot of it comes down to process — thinking about the sequence someone needs to go through in order to really learn something. I feel like when I really succeed in my classroom, for instance, it’s because I’ve reflected on what it took for me to figure something out. Then I think about the whole picture and how to take my students on a tour of the different elements of an issue. It’s about assembling all the different building blocks in the right order.
The problem we’re facing is that our society always wants to boil everything down. But it’s not about boiling things down. It’s about putting things together in a logical way. And whether you agree or disagree with what you’re reading, that should always be the goal. I think in some ways public scholarship is more necessary than ever now because of how dangerous our present moment is — how much of an impetus there is toward avoiding real engagement with facts and ideas.
What impact do you hope this work will have in Virginia and beyond — and what’s next for the project?
DS: My highest hope is that people come to wrestle with difficult questions about what monuments do. Part of what gives monuments their power is that they are both grandiose and mundane. They’re glorious, but they become part of the backdrop of our day-to-day existence, to the extent that we kind of stop seeing them. But just because they’re not jumping out at us every time we walk by doesn’t mean they’re not working on us. We need to be able to stop and look again at things we take for granted, then ask questions about what’s happening below the threshold of our awareness.
In terms of what’s next, this will eventually become a book! I couldn’t be more grateful to Virginia Humanities for giving me the opportunity to keep researching and developing these ideas.
Explore More
- Explore False Image of History website
- History of Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue
- Listen to #Charlottesville from With Good Reason
- Learn More About Virginia Humanities’ Fellowships
