Maura Lucking, “Settler Campus: Racial Uplift, Free Labor, and Land Tenure in American Design Education, 1866-1929” (University of California, Los Angeles, 2023)
This program will convene graduate students with the 2024 David B. Brownlee Dissertation Award Winner Maura Lucking. In a seminar format, graduate student attendees will be encouraged to bring thoughts and questions for Maura and for one another. Members of the SAH Graduate Student Advisory Committee will moderate the conversation.
The Brownlee Dissertation Award Committee states, “This thoroughly researched, rigorous piece of scholarship illuminates an important historical aspect of architecture in the long white American project to subjugate and forcibly discard the values and practices that characterized Native Americans’ distinct culture. “An architectural history of the nineteenth century public college movement in the United States,” the dissertation material submitted provides a nuanced and intelligent case study of Native American training in the building arts, one that shows “architectural history’s methodological capacity” and “makes room for the ways that seemingly minor actions from peripheral or marginalized peoples are often what shape the landscape of race and rights.” The dissertation material submitted is forcefully and compellingly written, unfolding the sad history of the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples into mainstream “settler colonial” culture, and the way that both the single-family home and the humbler cottage served as instruments of this assimilation through the protocols of domestic service and social labor in heteronormative, male-dominated North America. The investigation into the “afterlives of this model exported to new geographies in Liberia and the Philippines” promises to offer new transnational understandings on “the form and habitus of school-building” and how they “were integral to the expansion of American empire.” Opening to new geographies and histories of “minority architects trained at Land Grant colleges” the dissertation transposes “U.S. racial identities and hierarchies of labor onto an emergent Global South” giving a compelling breath to an already thorough and crucial research”.
As a program specially targeted toward graduate students, this will be an opportunity to engage with Maura about the completed dissertation, and thus to learn about the process. As significantly, it will be a forum for graduate students to connect with one another, to collectively think through ideas of scholarly approaches and relevancy.
The David B. Brownlee Dissertation Award Committee included Claire Zimmerman (Chair) with members Peter Clericuzio, Elisa Dainese, Jonathan Mekinda, and Valentina Rozas-Krause.
