Landscape Architecture Spring 2026 Lecture Series: Caitlin Blanchfield

Join us in 175 Warren Hall for a lecture with Caitlin Blanchfield, Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Architecture at AAP. This lecture is titled "Land, Environment, Impact: Environmental Review and the Politics of Protection on Indigenous Lands."

How do Indigenous land rights struggles challenge and reframe ideas of environmental protection? Weaving together histories of land protection movements on Mauna Kea in Hawai‘i and on the militarized borderlands of the Tohono O'odham Nation in southern Arizona, this talk foregrounds materiality and use a means to contest settler colonial attempts to expropriate land and control relationships to place.

Caitlin Blanchfield is a historian of architecture and landscape whose work examines the infrastructures of settler colonialism and material practices of resistance. Her research addresses the role of modernist land management and design practices in projects of dispossession and colonization in North America and across the reaches of US empire, as well as the anticolonial architectures that unsettle them.

Blanchfield received her Ph.D. in architectural history and theory from Columbia University and was a 2024–25 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University. She is currently working on her book Unsettling Public Lands: Indigenous Sovereignty, Scientific Architecture, and the Question of Use which offers a critical reading of modern architecture’s instrumentalization in late-20th-century expropriation of Indigenous lands, while narrating a built environment history of Indigenous resistance.