Carol Quillen

Carol Quillen is the president and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and president emerita and professor of history emerita at Davidson College, where she served as president from 2011 to 2022. Her public work focuses on higher education, civic life, historic preservation, and the role of public places in democratic memory.

Public Memory Must Show Its Work When History Is Contested

At the Aspen Ideas Festival panel “The Architecture of Remembrance,” historians and designers argued that public memory should neither preserve comforting myths nor replace them with a single corrective story. Jane Kamensky, Walter Hood and Carol Quillen made the case that monuments, historic sites and civic landscapes should show evidence, recover erased people and places, and trust visitors to confront contradiction. Their shared premise was that remembrance is an active public practice, shaped by discovery, design and democratic process.

The Aspen InstituteJun 30, 202620 min read