• Royce Fellowship
Tad
Heuer

Concentration 

Public Policy

Award Year 

1997
Developing methodologies for recording data about historical graveyards and grave markers

Faculty Sponsor: Robert Emlen.

Tad's project focuses on preserving historical graveyards in communities lacking the resources to document or maintain these cultural resources. He will create a guide to recording gravestone data that will help communities design their own preservation initiatives. Heuer's research will also be used to enhance the Brown course "Gravestones as Evidence of American Culture."

It is somewhat difficult to remember a time when digital cameras were not ubiquitous. Yet in 1998, the Royce Fellowship enabled Tad Heuer to purchase one of the very first digital cameras — a hulking grey box that recorded up to forty grainy images on a 3.5” floppy disk. Armed with this technological marvel of the twentieth century, he spent hours in the eighteenth century — methodically photographing old gravestones in overgrown rural Massachusetts’s cemeteries with the goal of developing a new approach to recording such unique written and visual information. A Truman Scholar and a Marshall Scholar, Tad received his Ph.D. in Social Policy from the London School of Economics, and later received his J.D. from Yale Law School. He returned to Massachusetts to clerk for the Honorable Margaret H. Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, and is currently an associate at Foley Hoag LLP in Boston, where his practice focuses on administrative and land use law.