As part of the School of Architecture & Urban Planning’s ongoing commitment to research and engagement, new M.Arch graduate students can apply for paid master’s research assistantships that cover the cost of tuition (in-state).

Objective: Alongside expert faculty, paid graduate students will develop proficiency in researching and communicating advanced topics in architecture. Research will have broader implications for the field of architecture while reinforcing SARUP’s reputation as a leading research institution.

Funding: The generous support of James and Maureen Mellowes has provided master’s research assistantship funding for three years. Up to three positions will be available annually.

Mellowes Master’s Research Assistants (MMRAs) will receive a stipend of $11,000, which can be applied to cover tuition or dispersed as a summer salary. Note that the stipend covers the full cost of in-state tuition.

Requirement: Mellowes Master’s Research Assistantships are open to newly accepted incoming fall of 2023 3-Year and 2-Year Master of Architecture graduate students only.

Apply here: – Apply before February 6, 2023

Faculty-led research topics for 2023-2024 include:

• An investigation into the spatial and architectural legacies of a constitutional right to privacy, as outlined in the State Constitution of Wisconsin with Lindsey Krug

   

  Overview: “Supreme Privacy, no. 30” will develop a body of research linking legal and architectural notions of privacy to establish disciplinary discourse invested in contemporary questions of bodily autonomy and agency in the built environment. By searching for and dissecting the hidden architectural realities of legal privacy, architects gain a deeper understanding of the implications of their work designing designated public spaces, designated private spaces, and many spaces in between, where the line between public-ness and private-ness is blurred. In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling acknowledging a citizen’s right to privacy in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut. Though considered a core national value, the word privacy does not exist in the text of the U.S. Constitution and therefore was, and continues to be, a topic of intense legal debate. “Supreme Privacy, no. 30” will look specifically at the State of Wisconsin (the 30th to gain statehood in 1848) and the state-level constitutional and legal debate over the right to privacy. The research methodology will combine text-based documents that are difficult to consume, with innovative and imaginative architectural representation strategies.

• Research on the policies and spatial practices of Native American housing and its relationship to self-determination, including a 1911 Oneida proposal for a model village in Wisconsin to be documented and partially realized as the “Three Sisters Garden City,” with Maura Lucking

   

  Overview: This Mellowes master’s fellowship takes an unrealized Garden City plan as its starting point to ask questions about architecture’s role in Native American sovereignty struggles, engaging student workers in a combination of research, community-engagement, and design. The Mellowes fellow will support historical and policy analysis, looking at the role that provisions for housing and building practices played in treaties and other government aid to Native communities in the twentieth century and identifying Native-led proposals and building projects that actively challenged those agendas. They will also help actively facilitate the partial realization of Indigenous activist Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s 1911 proposal to reclaim and transform the Wisconsin Oneida Reservation into a sovereign model village based on Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City. This may include liaising with scholars, community members, and tribal representatives, finding representational and documentation strategies appropriate to the site and project, researching relevant Indigenous design precedents (including Three Sisters planting methods and Haudenosaunee long houses) and designing and constructing an speculative facsimile of her plan for an agricultural and industrial residential co-operative that engages the UWM and Milwaukee Native communities.

• Networks of Indigenous resistance across urban and rural landscapes of Mexico with Tania Gutierrez Monroy

   

  Overview: This research will focus on the networks of Indigenous resistance against (neo)colonial occupation and extractivism built across urban and rural landscapes of Mexico. It will observe how anchoring and mobile forms of protest organized by members of the grassroots, nationwide organization Congreso Nacional Indígena transform the existing relationships between place and social fabric. The Mellowes Master’s Fellow will help organize and mine data from the digital archive being built in social media by this resistance organized by numerous Indigenous peoples of Mexico. Fluency in Spanish is a necessary qualification for the fellow to be able to help organize and analyze visual and textual materials.