The main purpose of the Office of Special Collections and Archives at Southwestern is to collect, document, preserve, and make accessible artifacts and records associated with the University's…
View Tour

Southwestern often calls on selectively its past to authorize its present and future. Many things here become naturalized as if they have always been that way. and always will be that way. That logic…
View Tour

When Southwestern tells its story, it often sounds like things just happen, or that heroic leaders made things happen. But it almost always has worked the other way around, where things have happened…
View Tour

Southwestern has enrolled White students since the beginning. Since the 1960s, the student body has slowly become more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity. In the early years, these students of…
View Tour

When you walk around Southwestern's campus, you encounter people's names. Some names are there because they are being remembered for some contribution they made to the institution or…
View Tour

Southwestern was formed and located in Georgetown, Texas, in 1872 by consolidating four root colleges--Rutersville, McKenzie, Soule, and Wesleyan--into Texas University, which was eventually renamed…
View Tour

Southwestern University, just like all four of its root colleges, is directly connected to Methodism. This relationship was particularly problematic in the mid- to late-19th Century, when all of the…
View Tour

In 2020, Ernest Kurth Residence Hall was renamed Ernest Clark Residence Hall. Ernest Kurth was a longtime member of the Southwestern Board of Trustees and someone who actively impeded the racial…
View Tour

Since its early years in Georgetown, Southwestern has enrolled both men and women, but in ways that segregated men from women students in separate and unequal spheres, both literally and figuratively,…
View Tour

Colleges and universities depend heavily on philanthropy for funding for buildings as well as programming. While the institutions are grateful for this support, it does generate lasting effects on the…
View Tour

For generations, students have had spaces for them built by university leaders or have claimed other campus public spaces controlled by the adults at Southwestern for themselves. These entries explore…
View Tour

Regardless of how a place is set up, the everyday inhabitants of that place generate their own uses. The now classic theorization of this dynamic comes from Michel de Certeau. In The Practice of Every…
View Tour

The first students of color at Southwestern were forced to assimilate to its dominant culture as a Predominantly White institution (PWI). As such, they were usually either domestic students of color…
View Tour