2026 Curtis Family Lecture Series featuring Rebekah Coffman

Join us for the 2026 Curtis Family Lecture Series featuring Rebekah Coffman, Curator of Religion and Community History at the Chicago History Museum.

Rebekah Coffman will present a talk titled, "Claiming Place, Shaping Memory: Building Histories of Belonging." A historian, preservationist, and curator, Coffman leads the Chicago Sacred initiative at the Chicago History Museum. Her interdisciplinary work is at the intersection of religious identity, the built environment, and sustainability through place-based, community-centered approaches.

In 2019, she began the Sacred Shift Project, which is an ongoing international survey of urban religious buildings adapted for ritual reuse by diasporic communities. She has received New York University’s Gavin Stamp Award in Adaptive Reuse, a commendation by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, and Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum’s Lindsey Jones Memorial Research award.

This event is presented by the Department of Communication and is made possible by the generosity of Geoff Curtis '97 and Emily Sammon.