Oct 17, 2023
by
Buell Center, Columbia University
Maura Lucking
2024–25 Buell Research and Teaching Fellow
Project: “Settler Campus”
While a Buell Fellow, Lucking will work on a book-length architectural history of the public college movement in the 19th century United States. The project is based on her dissertation, “Settler Campus: Racial Uplift, Free Labor, and Land Tenure in American Design Education, 1866-1929,” which examines three school typologies—the land grant college, the industrial institute, and the Indian boarding school—through a settler colonial framework. Lucking innovatively shows the role played by architecture, industrial design, and design pedagogy in rights-based legal outcomes for various racialized groups that were educated in these institutions. By emphasizing students’ self-sufficiency and manual labor, and often by involving them in campus construction projects, architectural education aligned design outcomes with narratives of respectability, freedom, and individual property. Lucking uncovers the links between this school-building habitus and social and economic ideals, from the immediate aftermath of the US Civil War, when social cohesion was understood to be under threat, into the 20th Century when educational models were exported to new geographies in Liberia and the Philippines.
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Maura Lucking joined SAH in 2016. She was awarded a Scott Opler Graduate Student Fellowship in 2018 and an SAH Dissertation Research Fellowship in 2021. Lucking was a speaker at the SAH 2018 Annual International Conference and a session chair at the SAH 2021 Virtual Conference.
