Maura Lucking

Education

Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles
M.A. School of the Art Institute of Chicago
B.A. Boston College

Biography

Maura Lucking is a historian of architectural modernism and the nineteenth century U.S. Her research studies design as the intersection of connected histories of race, craft, land, and labor.

Her forthcoming book, Settler Campus: Design, Free Labor, and Land Reform in American Education, provides an architectural history of the Land Grant college movement. In it, she studies the relationship between government policy, land use, campus planning, and design pedagogy at schools founded after the U.S. Civil War, considering the role of design practices in Black and Native dispossession as well as the construction of new racial identities and settler colonial hierarchies.

Another interest is in sociotechnical and media histories of architectural representation, including mechanical drawing & blueprinting, architectural photography, and mortgage and loan documents. New research considers state, missionary, and philanthropic approaches to housing and homebuilding projects in Indian country.

This scholarly work has been supported by the Winterthur Museum, Huntington Library, Graham Foundation, Society for Architectural Historians, and the Getty Research Institute and has appeared in Architectural Theory Review, Faktur, Grey Room, the Getty Research Journal, the Journal of Architectural Education, and Thresholds. She was the recipient of the 2024 Brownlee Dissertation Award, given by the Society of Architectural Historians to celebrate the most outstanding dissertation for that year in architectural history.