Mania Taher Awarded the 2024 Tompkins Fellowship

The Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to name Mania Taher, a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, as the 2024 HABS-SAH Sally Kress Tompkins Fellow. The Sally Kress Tompkins Fellowship, a joint program of SAH and the National Park Service’s Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), permits a graduate student in architectural history or a related field the opportunity to work on a 12-week HABS history project. Taher's fellowship project will focus on the Dearborn Mosque in Dearborn Michigan, the second oldest mosque in the United States. 

With an academic background that lies at the intersection of architecture and urban design, Taher's research investigates the cultural landscapes of new immigrants with queries of displacement, gender, and race. She holds a B.A. in Architecture from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in Dhaka, and received a Masters of Science in Architecture and Urban Design degree from Columbia University in New York. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the place-making of first-generation immigrant Bangladeshi women living in New York by examining their dwellings and a network of locations within their residential environments. She uses ethnographic research methods through a lens of displacement to investigate their occupied built spaces and explores how these women participate and shape their spaces inside and outside of their dwellings.