Maura Lucking (PhD '23) awarded SAH's 2024 David B. Brownlee Dissertation Award

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has awarded the David B. Brownlee Dissertation Award to Maura Lucking (PhD ‘23), honoring her AUD thesis “Settler Campus: Racial Uplift, Free Labor, and Land Tenure in American Design Education, 1866-1929.” Lucking officially received the award during a May 2024 ceremony.

A historian of architectural modernism and the nineteenth century United States, Lucking is interested in design as the intersection of connected histories of race, craft, land, and labor. She is currently assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Architecture and Urban Planning.

In "Settler Campus," Lucking offers an architectural history of the nineteenth century public college movement in the United States, a survey 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.”

Lucking's AUD dissertation advisor was associate professor Michael Osman. Lucking is currently working on a book project to expand this research.

Introduced in 2019, SAH's David B. Brownlee Dissertation Award recognizes the most outstanding doctoral dissertation in the field of architectural history completed during the two years prior to the submission date. The Award honors Brownlee, the Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, who is a historian of modern architecture and urbanism with wide-ranging interests.

Lucking joins AUD's Will Davis (PhD '21) among the cohort of four Brownlee Dissertation Award honorees since the prize's establishment. She has previously worked at the Graham Foundation and the Art Institute of Chicago and produced media projects including the documentary short “Church of Schindler” (2016) and the upcoming “I Pity the Countries” series on the Race & podcast. She is currently co-chair of the Race & Architectural History research group of the Society of Architectural Historians. In addition, Lucking's scholarly work has been supported by the Winterthur Museum, the Huntington Library, the Graham Foundation, the Society for Architectural Historians, and the Getty Research Institute and has appeared in Grey Room, the Getty Research Journal, Thresholds, Faktur, and the Journal of Architectural Education.