Dr. Theodore R. Foster III is a scholar trained in Black Studies and Assistant Professor of History and Black Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Dr. Foster’s research, writing and teaching explores how Blackness informs the politics of civil rights memory within museums, commemorative events, civil rights tourism in the U.S. South, post 1960s social movement activism, political campaigns, popular culture and Black visual culture. He is completing a book manuscript titled The Firehose Next Time: Civil Rights Memory, Blackness and Neoliberalism. Dr. Foster works closely with the Chicago SNCC History Project which is a public history initiative and non-profit organization documenting the Chicago Area Friends of SNCC through archival collections, oral history interviews, conferences and a summer internship program for students. In addition, Dr. Foster is the principal author of A Map to Black Studies which is a three-year $101,000 library collections development project and libguide housed in the Ernest J. Gaines Center at the Edith Garland Dupré Library at UL adding more than 1,200 books in the field to date. From Fall 2025-2027 Dr. Foster will be a Civil Rights Studies post doctoral research fellow with the Center for Civil Rights History and Research at the University of South Carolina.