Assistant Professor Maura Lucking named a 2023–2025 Fellow at Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture

Assistant Professor Maura Lucking has been named a 2023–2025 Fellow at Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture with joint appointments in the Society of Fellows at the Heyman Center for the Humanities and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation!

While a Buell Fellow, Maura 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. Maura 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. Maura 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.