MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Middle Tennessee State University alumna Tiffany Momon is returning to a role she once dreamed about — leading the university’s Center for Historic Preservation, or CHP.

“It’s such a good feeling that it’s me, the former graduate assistant, actually working here,” said Momon, seated in her Peck Hall office surrounded by history books and artifacts.

She follows in the footsteps of her mentor Carroll Van West, who led the center for three decades before retiring earlier this year with full confidence in Momon’s trajectory.

“With her demonstrated commitment to communities, students and the profession, Dr. Momon will accomplish wonderful things for Tennessee and the nation,” said West, who taught at MTSU for 41 years. “I can’t wait to see how her research and professionalism elevate the CHP to even greater heights.”

A long and winding road

Momon’s path to that office, though, was anything but straight. Momon graduated from Tennessee State University in 2007 with a degree in political science and dreams of going to Washington, D.C. But it was the start of what is known as the “Great Recession” and she ended up in corporate America, bored and unfulfilled.

“I realized that I don’t actually like sitting at a desk for eight hours a day,” Momon joked.

She had become interested in genealogy and decided in 2012 to return to school, earning a second bachelor’s degree in African and African American Studies from her hometown University of Memphis. On a whim, she applied to MTSU’s public history master’s program.

Soon after receiving the application, then-MTSU history professor Pippa Holloway called with an unexpected offer. She said, “I noticed that you applied, but I also noticed you didn’t ask us for any money. But I want to give you an assistantship.”

The position would pay her a monthly stipend and cover tuition. “I accepted … and typed up my two weeks’ notice,” Momon recalled.

Transitioning back to a classroom was challenging and she “felt like a fish out of water.”

But in her second semester at MTSU, she took a class with West on material culture, which is the study of objects and how people use them — including architecture.

“I realized I had found what I needed to be doing. I found the professor I needed to be working with and just like that, it clicked for me in that class. I found my spot,” said Momon, who was fascinated by a book, “Buying into the World of Goods,” which utilizes an old business ledger to examine the lives of residents who shopped at a backcountry Virginia store.

Graduate school and beyond

After earning her master’s in public history in 2016, Momon stepped into the history doctoral program at MTSU and focused her field of study on architecture at historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, and Rosenwald Schools, which were built for Black schoolchildren throughout the segregated Jim Crow-era South.

Once she earned her doctorate in 2019, Momon’s career took her to the University of the South, a private liberal arts college in Sewanee. There she became a tenured associate professor of history, taught public history courses and served as assistant director of the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race and Reconciliation, an initiative investigating the university’s historical entanglements with enslavement.

That year she also launched the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive. The student-driven project highlights the lives, labor and artistry of free and enslaved Black craftspeople in the American South from 1700-1900. Its traveling exhibition, “Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit of Independence,” which opened in 2025 at the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in D.C., will continue traveling through 2028.

She also co-curated “Troubled Like the Restless Sea,” a museum installation at the Milwaukee Art Museum that examines connection between enslavement, colonialism and trade of luxury decorative arts across the Atlantic.

Momon’s work in Sewanee brought her into partnership with Tennessee State Parks, where she met Hobart Akin, a cultural resources and exhibits specialist with the state parks system.

Akin worked with Momon and her students in Sewanee on an exhibit about convict leasing at what was then South Cumberland State Park, now Fiery Gizzard State Park, in neighboring Monteagle. The project brought together archaeology, public history and artifacts to tell a difficult chapter of Tennessee history.

Akin said Momon has a rare ability to make difficult subjects approachable.

“She’s somebody I always feel like I can just kind of talk to,” Akin said, describing her as down-to-earth and exceptionally skilled at explaining complex ideas in ways that encourage conversation. “I was also impressed with how she worked with her students and talked them through telling the story.”

In her new role, Momon hopes to help students build the skills, relationships and professional networks they need for careers in preservation and museums.

“One of the things that continues to inspire me the most are the students I meet because they remind you of why you do the work, and I’m so excited when I get to work with them and then they graduate, go off and you feel like a proud parent,” Momon said.

To learn more about the Center for Historic Preservation, visit mtsuhistpres.org/.

— Nancy DeGennaro ([email protected])