Charles Warren Center names nine scholars for 2004-05

Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies Lizabeth Cohen, director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, recently announced the names of nine scholars participating in the center’s 2004-05 workshop: “The Culture and Politics of the Built Environment.” This year’s Warren Fellows were selected from a pool of more than 75 applicants by Cohen and workshop co-director Margaret Crawford, professor of urban design and planning theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD).

“The Warren Center was attracted to the built environment topic because it is an exciting historical field ripe for new research and analysis, and because of the possibilities it offers for new kinds of interchange between the center, Harvard students, and scholars in many other parts of the University,” stated Cohen.

One example of such interchange is a new graduate course, “The History of the Built Environment in North America.” Warren Fellows will assist Cohen and Crawford with this yearlong graduate research seminar, expected to attract students from the GSD and a variety of departments and programs within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). Graduate students will attend Warren Fellow talks, and fellows will assist students in their research into various aspects of the built environment.

Warren Fellows will share their work with each other and scholars from Harvard and the Boston area, in the long-established workshop series that is the heart of the center’s intellectual community. Also making presentations in this series will be four invited guests, established leaders in the history of the built environment. The workshop meets alternate Mondays, 4 to 6 p.m., in the lower library of Robinson Hall.

Warren Fellows and research projects:

Daniel M. Abramson (Ph.D., Harvard University), Department of Art and Art History, Tufts University: “Obsolescence in Modern Architecture.”

Eric R. Avila (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley), Chavez Center for Chicano Studies and Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles: “Beneath the Shadows of the Freeway: Highway Construction and the Making of Race in the Modernist City.”

Alice T. Friedman (Ph.D., Harvard University), Department of Art, Wellesley College: “American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture” (fall term).

Paul Groth (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley), Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley: “Learning Modernity: Blue Collar Homes, Work, and Leisure in the American City after 1870” (spring term).

Jane Kamensky (Ph.D., Yale University), Department of History, Brandeis University: “The Exchange Artist: A Story of Paper, Bricks, and Ash in Early National America.”

Paula R. Lupkin (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania), School of Architecture, Washington University: “Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture, 1869-1929.”

Martha J. McNamara (Ph.D., Boston University), Department of History, University of Maine, Orono: “New England Visions: Landscape Change in the Early Republic.”

Anne Whiston Spirn (M.L.A., University of Pennsylvania), Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “The Once and Future City: The Mill Creek Neighborhood of West Philadelphia.”

Ellen Stroud (Ph.D., Columbia University), Department of History, Oberlin College: “Dead as Dirt: An Environmental History of the Urban Corpse.”