Fellowship

Buell Graduate Fellowships are annual awards available to Columbia University students for historical research on the built environment, including but not limited to architecture, urbanism, landscape, and the building sciences.

Buell Center Research and Teaching Fellowships are intended to give recently graduated postdoctoral fellows a chance to advance their own research, gain teaching experience, and take part in the ongoing intellectual life of the Buell Center, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), and Columbia University—over the course of twenty-one months (two academic years and one intervening summer). Fellows will be co-hosted by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Prize

Annually between 2017 and 2020, three prizes were awarded to students at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation whose fall semester architectural design (MArch & AAD) studio projects most successfully complied with, interpreted, and/or critically extended the terms and spirit of the 2015 Paris Agreement. 

Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture together with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, calls for course proposals on the theme of “Architecture, Climate Change, and Society.”

The Catherine Hoover Voorsanger Writing Prizes were generously endowed by Voorsanger and Associates, Architects. Each prize was given at the end of the academic year for an outstanding paper on a subject in American architecture, landscape or urbanism written during the academic year. One prize was awarded to a student in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; the other was to awarded to a graduate student in the Department of Art History or to an undergraduate at Columbia or Barnard College for a senior thesis. Each prize carried an honorarium of $250.

Buell Postdoctoral Fellowship

Buell Center Research and Teaching Fellowships are intended to give recently graduated postdoctoral fellows a chance to advance their own research, gain teaching experience, and take part in the ongoing intellectual life of the Buell Center, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), and Columbia University—over the course of twenty-one months (two academic years and one intervening summer). Fellows will be co-hosted by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Buell Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2024–26

 

Image

 

The application period for the 24-26 Fellowship has closed. 

The Buell Center at Columbia University seeks a recent doctoral recipient to join its intellectual community for a 21-month fellowship as a “Buell Center Research and Teaching Fellow.” Ideal candidates will be scholars of the built environment who are beginning an academic career of research and teaching, with a growing record of original writing intended for peer-reviewed publication. Complementary experience, such as design, curatorial, critical, or fourth-purpose organizing work, is welcome but not required. The 21-month fellowship will begin on September 1, 2024, and is intended to give fellows a chance to advance their own research, gain teaching experience, and take part in the ongoing intellectual life of the Buell Center; the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP); and Columbia University. The Fellow will be co-hosted by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities. A recent PhD degree in Architecture or a related field is required by the start date of the appointment. PhDs granted within the last three years prior to the appointment start date are acceptable.

Successful candidates:

  • must have a PhD conferred within three years of—and no later than—the start date of the appointment
  • must demonstrate an interest in pushing the disciplinary or methodological norms of architecture and related fields of the built environment
  • should have a growing record of bridging across disciplines in the humanities or social sciences
  • may be focused on any historical period and geographic area in their research

The Fellow is expected to be in residence at Columbia for two academic years and will remain a fellow in the intervening summer, but not required to be in residence. In addition to presenting their research once yearly in a formal setting, Fellows will teach at least one semester as faculty in GSAPP’s architectural history survey course, “Questions in Architectural History” (QAH). The Fellow may also propose to teach a separate course based on their own research within GSAPP.

Interested applicants should submit: a CV; a cover letter; a research statement (1,500 words), dissertation abstract (150 words), one-sentence project description, one to three images (on one page); a teaching statement (500 words); at least one writing sample; and the names of three references. Recommendation letters will be solicited for shortlisted applicants.

The salary of the finalist selected for this role will be set based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to departmental budgets, qualifications, experience, education, licenses, specialty, and training. $75,000 represents the University’s good faith and reasonable estimate of possible compensation at the time of posting. Columbia University is an Equal Opportunity Employer / Disability / Veteran.

The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture is a separately endowed entity within Columbia GSAPP, which sponsors interdisciplinary research through projects, workshops, public programming, publications, and awards. For further information about the Buell Center please visit: buellcenter.columbia.edu and/or reach out to [email protected].

Please visit our online application site at https://apply.interfolio.com/128122 for further information about this position and to submit your application. Review of applications will begin on October 2, 2023.

 

Image

 

Graphic design by MTWTF

Buell Postdoctoral Fellow, 2023–25

 

Image

 

 

Maura Lucking
2024-25 Buell Research and Teaching Fellow

Project: “Settler Campus”

While a Buell Fellow, Lucking 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. Lucking 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. Lucking 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.

Lucking will begin at Columbia on January 1, 2024. As part of the Buell Fellowship, she will join a cohort of fellows at the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center, as well as the faculty team teaching the landmark course, “Questions in Architectural History” at GSAPP.


Biography  
Maura Lucking is an historian of architectural modernism and empire in the 19th- and 20th-Century United States. She received her PhD in Architecture from UCLA in 2023, and is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her work has been supported by the Winterthur Museum, Huntington Library, Graham Foundation, the Society for Architectural Historians, and the Getty Research Institute, and been published in Grey Room, Getty Research Journal, Thresholds, Faktur, and Journal of Architectural Education.
 

Image

Students and instructors in a staged publicity photograph for donors to Tuskegee Institute, 1909 (LOC)