ABSTRACT
This opening chapter defines the focus on physical memorial structures attached to U.S. college campuses and their accompanying events. It offers a foundation and rationale for the study of such memorials, contextualizing them within the larger body of literature on memorialization, and highlights the applicability of the findings shared throughout this book. In so doing, this chapter first takes up the question of what gets memorialized on college campuses. Using Zdziarski et al.'s (2021) crisis matrix as a framework, the types of events that have been memorialized over time are categorized. The remainder of the chapter situates this book within the existing literature and outlines the chapter structure.
