Friday Fellow Feature: Jennifer R. Blanks

Our featured Fellow for May 2024 is Dr. Jennifer Blanks, a PhD candidate who has successfully defended her dissertation and will soon receive a doctoral degree in urban and regional science from Texas A&M University. 

Dr. Blanks joined the Bill Anderson Fund as a Fellow in 2018. She has served on the BAF Collaborative Communities Disaster Dash Committees. She was selected as a BAF plenary speaker and Public Communication of Science Fellow for the 2022 Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop. Her speech can be viewed here. Additionally, from 2022-2023 she served as the Vice-Chair of the BAF Student Council. 

Dr. Blanks is a member of the Texas Freedom Colonies Project under the mentorship of Andrea Roberts. Jennifer’s role in the Texas Freedom Colonies Project includes managing The Texas African American Cemetery Registry–a voluntary database of Black burial grounds in Texas. The goal is to create a resource for cemetery stewards that guides The Texas Freedom Colonies Project to help stewards determine the best way to preserve their burial grounds. Jennifer also supports the operations of the Atlas, a geospatial database, leading demonstrations for the Atlas, creating new spatial layers to the Atlas, and mentoring junior researchers to help her engage.

Dr. Blanks identifies as an environmental planner; however, her other research interests include hazards and disaster management, preservation planning, and Black geographies. Her dissertation project builds upon existing literature bodies that offer best practices for African American participatory preservation methods, theories, and approaches to provide perpetual care for historic ancestral and burial grounds. As cemeteries, a non-renewable resource, are emerging as points of concern in environmental justice through an advocacy planning lens that centers on the deceased, Dr. Blanks believes preservationists and planners benefit from improving hazard management of historic resources. In addition, she wishes to understand how community members can leverage existing traditional, technical, and innovative preservation tools to enhance overall cemetery maintenance and preserve the cultural landscape found in cemeteries. You can learn more about Dr. Blanks’s research by reading her featured article in the Natural Hazards Center’s Research Counts series.