SouthernBelle Radical.

Eliza Jane Franklin—known publicly as The SouthernBelle Radical—is a historian, heritage conservationist, and digital humanist whose work examines Black memory, material culture, racial violence, and cultural landscapes across the American South and the broader African Diaspora.

Franklin is the founder of the Black Heritage Society of Eufaula, Alabama, an organization dedicated to recovering and preserving Black and Indigenous histories embedded within the region’s historic landscape. Through this work she seeks to reinterpret heritage, challenge dominant historical narratives, and curate spaces that acknowledge both the trauma and resilience that shape African American historical memory.

Her research is deeply personal. Franklin’s great-grandfather was lynched in Eufaula, Alabama, a history that profoundly shaped her intellectual path. Confronting this legacy led her to develop the concept of heritage lynching (2024), a framework that examines how systems of power terrorize, control, or manipulate cultural heritage, historical landscapes, and collective memory.

Franklin’s scholarship places particular emphasis on material culture and spatial memory, exploring how objects, clothing, domestic spaces, landscapes, and archives reveal the lived experiences of Black communities from the antebellum period through the twentieth century. While rooted in the historical landscapes of the American South, her work engages broader questions of heritage, memory, and preservation across the African Diaspora.

Franklin is currently a doctoral student in the Department of History at Auburn University. She holds a Master of Arts in Heritage Conservation from the University of Southern California, a Master of Arts in Urban and Regional Planning from University of California, Los Angeles, and a Bachelor of Arts in African American Studies from UCLA.

She previously served as a Curatorial Intern at the Getty Research Institute, where she worked with modern and contemporary collections and archival materials.

As The SouthernBelle Radical, Franklin bridges academic research and public history through writing, lectures, digital humanities projects, heritage interpretation, and community preservation initiatives. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally, including in Amsterdam and reflects a broader commitment to recovering marginalized histories and reimagining how cultural heritage is interpreted across the African Diaspora.