Katherine Saunders Pemberton
Lecturer, Master of Science in Historic Preservation
Contact
School of Architecture
Email: saunder@clemson.edu
Education
B.A. in Historic Preservation, Mary Washington College (1991)
Katherine Saunders Pemberton is a native of Virginia and earned her BA in Historic Preservation from Mary Washington College. Katherine first worked as an archaeologist at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest before moving to Charleston in 1992. She then worked for SC State Parks and The Charleston Museum before joining the staff of Historic Charleston Foundation. From 1996 to 2020 she served as HCF’s Director of Preservation and the Manager of Research and Education. Katherine attended the Attingham Summer School for the study of the English Country House in 1999 and has taken graduate courses in History at the College of Charleston and the Citadel. In 2005, Katherine began teaching the course "Historical Research Methods" for the Clemson Graduate Program in Historic Preservation. That same year she was appointed chair of the Mayor's Walled City Task Force which seeks to investigate, through research and archaeology, the history of America’s only English walled city. Katherine served on South Carolina’s National Register Review Board for the SC Department of Archives and History from 2016-2020. Today, Katherine Pemberton is the Director of the Powder Magazine Museum and Director of Programming for the National Society of the Colonial Dames in America in the State of South Carolina (NSCDA-SC), the non-profit organization that administers The Powder Magazine Museum.
