The digital tours are part of an initiative UVA President Jim Ryan announced recently to update and contextualize the University’s historic landscape through a variety of commemorative efforts, including the display of physical markers, portraits and photographs around Grounds.
“This tour app is another important way to help us tell a more complete history of the University,” Ryan said. “I hope that people come away from this tour with a more informed view of the experience of enslaved African Americans at UVA and how inseparable the built environment of the Academical Village is from the presence of slavery.”
This app expands a printed brochure of a self-guided walking tour for visitors that the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University published four years ago, as the renovated Rotunda reopened. Last semester, University Library staff collaborated with history professor and assistant dean Kirt von Daacke; Mary Hughes, UVA landscape architect; and Meghan Faulkner from the Division for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to update and enhance the walking tour.