The Mellon Initiative in Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks offers semester-long fellowships to academics and designers, with additional opportunities for field research funding, and shorter-term invitational residencies for senior practitioners.
Past Fellows
2022–2023
To learn more about each scholar's project, please see the 2022–2023 Annual Report.
Academic Year
- Ashon T. Crawley, (University of Virginia, Fall Term), " In Search of our Mothers' Gardens"
- Claire Dunning, (University of Maryland, College Park, Spring Term), “Funding the Urban North: Policy, Philanthropy, and Racial Equity “After” Civil Rights”
- Rabia Harmanşah, (University of Cologne, Spring Term) “Mapping the Forgotten Landscape: People, Power and Belonging”
- Kathryn E. Holliday, (University of Texas at Arlington, Academic Year) “Telephone City: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Rise and Fall of the Bell Monopoly”
Summer 2022 Fellowships in Urban Humanities, “Landscapes of Civil and Human Rights
- Alissa Diamond, (University of Virginia), “Entangled Histories for Indeterminate Futures: Racial Capitalisms, Resistances, and Space in Central Virginia”
- Jennifer Hock, (Maryland Institute College of Art), “Breaking Ground: Activists and Experts Build the New Boston, 1960-1975”
- Delande Justinvil, (American University), “Exhuming the Ex-Human: A Biocultural Investigation of Black Remains in the Town of George”
- Amanda Martin-Hardin, (Columbia University), “Greenlining: Outdoor Recreation and Segregation in the United States”
2021–2022
To learn more about each scholar's project, please see the 2021–2022 Annual Report.
Academic Year
- Rosabella Alvarez-Calderón (Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Fall), “Negotiating the Future of Prehispanic Landscapes in Contemporary Cities: Rethinking Ancient Sites as Free/Raw Space” (Mellon History Teaching Fellow in Landscape Studies)
- Farhan Karim (University of Kansas, Spring), “Landscape of Marginality: Bihari Refugee Camps of Dhaka, Bangladesh” (Mellon History Teaching Fellow in Landscape Studies)
- Sarah Lopez (University of Texas at Austin), “Architectural History Is Migrant History: The Development of a Binational Construction Industry from Below”
- Samantha L. Martin (University College Dublin, Fall), “Designing for Dissent: Democracy, Urbanism, and the Mediation of Conflict” (Mellon History Teaching Fellow in Landscape Studies)
- Glenn LaRue Smith (Founder and Principal, PUSH Studio, LLC, Spring), “Out of the Shadows: Black Landscape Architects, 1898–1965”
- Amber N. Wiley (Rutgers University), “‘The Revolution Continues’: The 1976 Bicentennial and the Black Heritage Movement”
- Danielle S. Willkens (Georgia Institute of Technology, Fall), “From Plantation to Protest: Visualizing Cultural Landscapes of Conflict in the American South” (Mellon History Teaching Fellow in Landscape Studies)
Summer 2021
- Elgin Cleckley (University of Virginia), “6D: _mpathic Design for Race and Cultural Landscapes”
- Anna Livia Brand (University of California, Berkeley), “Freedom Cartographies: Locating Racial Oppression and (Re)Tracing an Archive of Black Radical Imaginaries” (Mellon History Teaching Fellow in Landscape Studies)
- Pollyanna Rhee (University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign), “Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920–1975”
2020–2021
To learn more about each scholar's project, please see the 2020–2021 Annual Report.
Academic Year
- Danika Cooper (University of California, Berkeley, Fall), “Strategic Invisibility: The Exploitative Histories of Desert Landscapes”
- Arijit Sen (University of Wisconsin–Madison, Spring), “Restorative Ligaments: Spaces of Everyday Resistance and Grassroots World-Making in Milwaukee’s Northside”
- Alec Stewart (University of California, Berkeley), “From Swap Meet to Main Street: Multiethnic Commercial Landscapes in Southern California at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century”
2018–2019
To learn more about each scholar's project, please see the 2018–2019 Annual Report.
Academic Year
- Sheila Crane (University of Virginia, Spring), “Inventing Informality”
- Sahar Hosseini (Rutgers University–Newark, Fall), “The Zayandehrud River Speaks: Reading the Riverine Landscapes of Seventeenth-Century Isfahan”
- Sarah Klassen (Arizona State University, Fall), “Agro-Urban Environments and Implications for Resilience in Medieval Cambodia”
- Toru Mitani (Chiba University, Fall), “Garden and Forest in Urban Space”
- Sara Zewde (Independent Scholar, Spring), “Cotton Kingdom, Now”
2017–2018
To learn more about each scholar's project, please see the 2017–2018 Annual Report.
Academic Year
- Basak Durgun (George Mason University), “Cultural Politics of Urban Green Spaces: The Production and Reorganization of Istanbul’s Parks and Gardens”
- Jacob Boswell (Ohio State University), “Urban Space and Climate in the Progressive-Era American City”
- John King (San Francisco Chronicle), “New Forms of Urban Public Space and the Publics That They Serve”
- Laurie Olin (Spring), “The Problem of Nature and Aesthetics in Planting Design”
- Maria Taylor (University of Michigan), “Between Town and Country: The Soviet City-Landscape Nexus in Global Perspective”
2016–2017
To learn more about each scholar's project, please see the 2016–2017 Annual Report.
Academic Year
- Megan Asaka (University of California, Riverside, Fall), “The Unsettled City: Migration, Race, and the Making of Seattle’s Urban Landscape”
- Sara Carr (University of Hawaii at Manoa, Spring), “The Topography of Wellness: Health and the American Urban Landscape”
- Peter Ekman (University of California, Berkeley, Spring), “Suburbs of Last Resort: Vitality and Ruin on the Edges of San Francisco Bay”
- Burak Erdim (North Carolina State University, Fall), “The Academy and the State: Situating Land Economics and Development Planning in the Cold War Middle East”
- Jeanne Haffner (2015–2017), Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies
- Udo Weilacher (Technical University of Munich, Spring), “Between Land Art and Landscape Architecture”
2015–2016
To learn more about each scholar's project, please see the 2015–2016 Annual Report.
Academic Year
- Christina Milos (University of Hannover, Fall), “Anticipatory Urbanization Strategies for In-Situ Oil Sands Extraction in Nigeria”
- Jeanne Haffner (2015–2017), Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies
- Gary Hilderbrand (Harvard Graduate School of Design and Reed Hilderbrand, Spring), “Transforming Campus Paradigms: Two Olmsted Brothers Cases”
- Alpa Nawre (Kansas State University, Spring), “Adaptive Land-Water Edges in Indian Cities”
- Kara Schlichting (Queens College, City of New York, Spring), “The Nature of Urban Coastal Resiliency: Twentieth-Century Governance, Environmental Management, and Design”
- David Wooden (District Department of the Environment, Fall), “Washington’s Sewer History: Ideological, Technological, and Environmental Evolution”
2014–2015
To learn more about each scholar's project, please see the 2014–2015 Annual Report.
Academic Year
- Anthony Wain (Spring), “Searching for Common Ground in the Gardens of the Past: Transition and Transfiguration in the Post-Colonial Landscapes of Africa and Asia”