The University of Tulsa is pleased to announce that Aaron Schoenfeldt has been selected as the 2025-26 Duane H. King Postdoctoral Fellow at the Helmerich Center for American Research on the grounds of Tulsa’s renowned Gilcrease Museum.
Schoenfeldt holds a master’s degree in social sciences from the University of Chicago and will receive his doctorate in cultural anthropology from Northwestern University in June. His dissertation is titled “Victims Without Perpetrators: The Making of White Innocence in the Wake of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.”
“We know so much about the victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre but far less about the white perpetrators. My research confronts this silence and asks why, across generations, white communities have inherited a kind of non-knowledge,” he said. “Tulsa is not just the backdrop to my work, it’s a central actor. The city’s complex history around race and memory offers an unparalleled site to explore how communities choose what to remember, and what to forget.”
Schoenfeldt is passionate about Tulsa’s history and the use of public humanities to aid in the remembrance of traumatic community events. “Public memory isn’t just about archives and exhibits, it’s also about people. I want to create public programs that invite teachers, students, and community members to examine the difficult truths of Tulsa’s past together,” he said.
Each year, the Duane H. King Postdoctoral Fellow teaches an undergraduate course in the fall semester and one course in the spring semester, presents research at one works-in-progress seminar, runs a one-day workshop for local teachers, conducts research in the Helmerich Center for American Research and UTulsa’s McFarlin Library (if applicable), and participates in the intellectual community of the university.
The Helmerich Center houses the Gilcrease Museum Library and Archive, containing more than 100,000 rare books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and unpublished works. The collection dates back to the time of Columbus and details the Spanish arrival in the Americas, the New England colonies, the founding of democracy in the United States, and Anglo-Indian contact and conflict in the American West. The center also holds a large Native American collection of manuscripts, photographs, maps, and rare books. Materials housed in McFarlin Library’s Special Collections complement many of the center’s strengths and offers unique research opportunities in English and American literature. The McFarlin Library Special Collections holds significant collections include a wide variety of British, Irish, and American modernist literature, a large and varied collection of materials on World War I, Native American history and culture, and Tulsa race relations.