Erika D. Henson

Erika D. Henson is a historian, attorney, and cultural-resources professional whose work sits at the intersection of infrastructure, historic preservation, environmental compliance, law, and public history.

As a Senior Historian with the Georgia Department of Transportation, she works within complex project-development environments involving Section 106 review, historic-resource identification and evaluation, archival research, field survey, regulatory coordination, and the interpretation of cultural landscapes and historic districts. Her work requires moving between technical analysis, legal and regulatory frameworks, community history, project management, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Henson’s broader research and professional interests examine how infrastructure decisions shape communities, how historic places are recognized and protected, and how cultural knowledge can be incorporated more meaningfully into planning and development. Her work increasingly focuses on context-sensitive transportation, cultural landscapes, marginalized and vernacular places, and the relationship between law, history, and the built environment.

Trained in both law and environmental policy, Henson brings an unusually broad perspective to complex institutional problems. She is particularly interested in work that requires not only subject-matter expertise, but also strategic judgment, cross-disciplinary leadership, research design, and the ability to translate complicated historical and regulatory questions into clear decisions.

Her professional philosophy is simple: understand the system, understand the place, understand the people—and then build better decisions from all three.