Midday Dialogues are not open to the public and, due to COVID-19 and remote fellowships, only current fellows are invited to attend. Should staff like to attend a specific Midday Dialogue, please reach out to do.mellonfellows@doaks.org and we will do our best to accommodate you based on numbers.
2022–2023
The Parti: Understanding African American Placemaking History and Design through Place Naming Practices
Monday, April 24th, 2023, 11 a.m.–12:30 p.m. in the Study | Andrea Roberts
Sovereign Curation: Placing Indigenous Knowledge Carriers at Center
Monday, February 13, 2023, 11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. in the Study | Gabrielle Tayac
Teaching In Place: Southern Black Women’s Literary Geographies
Friday, February 3, 2023, 11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. in the Study | Maia Butler
‘If People Were Like Flowers’: Anne Spencer’s Environmental Imagination
Monday, December 5, 2022, 11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. in the Study | Carlyn Ferrari
Black Ecologies and the Jim Crow Enclosure of the Tidewater
Friday, September 23, 2022, 11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. in the Study | J.T. Roane
Past Topics
2022
A World Unmapped: Terrains for Resistance, Courtesy of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1607-1863
Tuesday, April 19, 2022 | Dan Sayers
Building Indigenous Earthworks Today: Replicas or Reactivations?
January 13, 2022 | Chadwick Allen (Zoom)
2021
Cotton Kingdom
April 22, 2021 | Sara Zewde (Zoom)
Approaching Material Ecology: Plows and the Landscape Environment in the Lives of Many Enslaved
March 18, 2021 | Tony Perry (Zoom)
Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
January 28, 2021 | Lauret Savoy (Zoom)
2020
Water in the Lumbee World: Indigenous Rights, Environmental Justice, and the Reshaping of Home
December 3, 2020 | Ryan Emanuel (Zoom)
Architectural History as Migrant History: The Development of a Binational Construction Industry
November 19, 2020 | Sarah Lopez (Zoom)
Essential Businesses of Oak Bluffs: Black Heritage in the Highlands
October 22, 2020 | Fallon Aidoo (Zoom)
Landscape of Power: Mapping the Cultural Landscape at Great Zimbabwe through Narratives
October 6, 2020 | Ashton Sinamai (Zoom)
Colonial Sovereignty and the Unmaking of the Kanpur Memorial Well Monument
March 5, 2020 | Swati Chattopadhyay
Landscapes of Segregation: Race, Recreation and Resistance in Modern America
February 20, 2020 | Victoria W. Wolcott
The Freedom Colony Repertoire: Promising Approaches to Bridging and Bonding Social Capital between Urban and Rural Black Meccas
January 23, 2020 | Andrea R. Roberts
Bullets over the Borderlands
January 16, 2020 | Robert Alexander González
2019
The Geologic Setting of Dumbarton Oaks
December 12, 2019 | Joe Marx
A Brief History of Water in the Ten Miles Square: 1790–1910
November 21, 2019 | David Wooden
Towards an Indigenous Landscape Ethic: Reflections on the Power of Place-Making through Indigenous Knowledge
November 7, 2019 | Scott Heyes
Mapping Inequalities
October 17, 2019 | LaDale Winling
Deurbanization and the Utopia of Dispersion
April 17, 2019 | Max Rohm
The Architecture of Leaves: Art and Atlas
March 13, 2019 | Douglas C. Daly and John D. Mitchell
Cotton Kingdom, Now
February 19, 2019 | Sara Zewde
Choreographing Topography
February 6, 2019 | Bradley Cantrell
Toward a History of the Bidonville/Karian as Urban Landscape
January 30, 2019 | Sheila Crane
2018
Agro-Urban Environments and Implications for Resilience in Medieval Cambodia
November 14, 2018 | Sarah Klassen
To Feel at Home in the Wild: E. P. Meinecke’s Modern Autocampground
October 17, 2018 | Terence Young
The Zayandehrud River Speaks: Reading the Riverine Landscapes of Seventeenth-Century Isfahan
October 10, 2018 | Sahar Hosseini
Garden and Forest in Urban Space
September 19, 2018 | Toru Mitani
The Problem of Nature and Aesthetics in Planting Design
April 4, 2018 | Laurie Olin
Visions of an Unrealized Park: Chile’s Cerro San Cristóbal, 1915–1927
February 21, 2018 | Romy Hecht
Cultivating Communism: Soviet City Greening and Beautification, 1930s–1960s
February 14, 2018 | Maria Taylor
The Tropical Body
February 7, 2018 | Jacob Boswell
Today’s American Urban Spaces: New Roles and New Restrictions
January 31, 2018 | John King
2017
The Emergence, Ecology and Future of Anthropogenic Biomes
November 29, 2017 | Erle Ellis
“What Would You Like to See on This Land?”: Building Equality in the Civil Rights Movement
October 25, 2017 | Brian Goldstein
The Cultural Politics of Urban Green Spaces: The Production and Reorganization of Istanbul's Parks and Gardens
October 4, 2017 | Basak Durgun
Confluences in Landscape Legibility
September 27, 2017 | Todd Gilens
Urban Historic Preservation: The Imperative for Ethnic Diversity and Collective Stewardship
September 20, 2017 | Everett L. Fly
Places to Share Beauty and Fear
April 25, 2017 | Rebecca Krinke
Rus in Urbe: The Urban Landscape of Rome in the Age of the Grand Tour
April 18, 2017 | John Pinto
How a Bird's Eye View of the City Teaches Us about Urban Ecology
April 12, 2017 | Amanda Rodewald
Gardens for the Senses: The Influences of History and Family Values in My Gardens
March 28, 2017 | Javier Mariátegui
“A Great Functioning Whole”: Urban Design and Emergent Environmentalism in San Francisco’s Panhandle Freeway Debates, 1959–66
March 15, 2017 | Margot Lystra
“It’s Like Scotland, Minus the Weather”: An Ethnographic Account of Landscape in Bahrain
March 7, 2017 | Gareth Doherty
Middling Landscapes: Animating Life and Work on the Carquinez Strait
March 1, 2017 | Peter Ekman
The Topography of Wellness: Health and the American Urban Landscape
February 8, 2017 | Sara Carr
The Metropolitan Garden as a Sensorial Expression of Place in the Metropolitan Context
February 1, 2017 | Saskia de Wit
2016
Shape the Earth: Landscape Architecture in the Anthropocene
November 29, 2016 | John Davis and Jeanne Haffner
Unsettled City: Migration, Race, and the Making of Seattle's Urban Landscape
November 22, 2016 | Megan Asaka
Landscape Entanglements. Aesthetic Practices in a Networked World
November 8, 2016 | Elizabeth Meyer
Landed Internationals: Planning Cultures in the Cold War Middle East
October 26, 2016 | Burak Erdim
Street Tree Stories: On the Politics of Nature in the City
October 19, 2016 | Sonja Dümpelmann
Dancing on the Grave of Industry: Wenders, Bausch & the Affective Re-performance of Environmental History
October 11, 2016 | Jeremy Foster
Making Post Rock: Material Research through Design
October 5, 2016 | Meredith Miller
Producing Green Expertise: Place, Pedagogy and Sustainable Architecture in Mumbai
April 26, 2016 | Anne Rademacher
The Rise of Innovation Districts: The Intersection of Innovation and Quality Places
April 19, 2016 | Jennifer Vey
Vegetal City
April 5, 2016 | Gary Hilderbrand
Inventing Informality in Algiers and Casablanca
March 29, 2016 | Sheila Crane
Informal by Design: From Amerindian “Garden Cities” to Olympic Urbanism in Brazil
March 16, 2016 | Bruno Carvalho
The Nature of Urban Coastal Resiliency: Twentieth-Century Governance, Environmental Management, and Design
February 24, 2016 | Kara Schlichting
Talaab, Ghat & Canal Waterworks on the Indian Urban Landscape
February 24, 2016 | Alpa Nawre
Beyond the City: Metropolitan Environments and Urban Identification
February 2, 2016 | Mariana Mogilevich
Design Matters! (Even at the EPA)
January 20, 2016 | Clark Wilson
The Flood of Missed Opportunities: Florence, November 4, 1966
January 5, 2016 | Anatole Tchikine
2015
Housing, Landscape, Environment
December 8, 2015 | Jeanne Haffner
Critical Work: Innovative Green Infrastructure Regulations Transforming DC
December 2, 2015 | David Wooden, Meredith Unchurch, and Rebecca Stack
Anticipating Future Urbanization in Nigeria’s Oil Sands Belt
November 10, 2015 | Christina Milos
Restoring Brown Places into Green Spaces Through Community Engagement: The Masonville Story
November 3, 2015 | Katrina Jones
The Topography of Post-Industrial Gentrification: Toxic Identities and Flooded Realities in Gowanus, Brooklyn
October 14, 2015 | Juan-Andres Leon
A History of Environmental Designs
September 29, 2015 | Peder Anker