Featuring Our Faculty

Community Sense of Place

Community Outreach Interests

My interests lie in the area of assisting communities with the development and planning of cultural tourism resources, specifically those related to heritage or historical issues.  I have previous experience analyzing and/or evaluating the impact of community festivals, film-induced tourism, sports tourism, and place promotional strategies.  I am especially interested in working with African American communities in the American South as they seek greater visibility within the wider heritage tourism landscape and the development of civil rights-related memorials and tourist destinations.

Research Interests

As a cultural geographer, my main research interests focus on examining the relationship between the politics of place-making and tourism promotion and development, how tourist places and spaces serve as arenas for the negotiation of identity, social power, memory within communities.  Much of my interest lies in analyzing the extent and nature in which the African American historical experience is incorporated into the southern landscape, particularly the commemoration of the civil rights movement and the American slave experience. I have a general interest in southern popular culture. For example, he has written about the geography of NASCAR, the Internet as electronic folklore, Graceland as a pilgrimage landscape, the politics of Wal-Mart, and the cultural history of kudzu.

Notable Publications

• Alderman, Derek H. 2010. "Surrogation and the Politics of Remembering Slavery in Savannah, Georgia." Journal of Historical Geography 36: 90-101.  
• Mitchelson, Ronald L. and Derek H. Alderman. 2010. "Red Dust and Dynamometers: Charlotte as Memory and Knowledge Community in NASCAR." Charlotte, NC: The Global Evolution of a New South City, University of Georgia Press (edited by William Graves and Heather A. Smith), pp.50-86.  
• Alderman, Derek H., and E. Arnold Modlin, Jr. 2008. "(In)Visibility of the Enslaved within Online Plantation Tourism Marketing: A Textual Analysis of North Carolina Websites." Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 25(3-4): 265-281.  
• Dwyer, Owen J. and Derek H. Alderman. 2008. Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory.  Book published by Center for American Places and University of Georgia Press.
• Alderman, Derek H. and Rachel Campbell. 2008. "Symbolic Excavation and the Artifact Politics of Remembering Slavery in the American South: Observations from Walterboro, South Carolina." Southeastern Geographer 48(3): 338-355.  
• Jones, Kimberly L. and Derek H. Alderman. 2003. "Antiques Tourism and the Selling of Heritage in Eastern North Carolina." North Carolina Geographer 11: 74-87.
• Alderman, Derek H. 2002. "Writing on the Graceland Wall: On the Importance of Authorship in Pilgrimage Landscapes." Tourism Recreation Research 27(2): 27-34.

Courses

• GEOG 4315/6315: Geographic Images/Advanced Geographic Images
• GEOG 4335/6335: Geography of Tourism/Tourism Development
• GEOG 7300: Seminar in Geography of Heritage