Thaisa Way: Why History Matters NOW

The Department of Landscape Architecture is proud to welcome Thaisa Way to present at the department's Landscape Lecture Series.

Speaker Bio:

Thaisa Way is the Director of Studies for Garden & Landscape Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, a Harvard University research institution located in Washington DC. As a landscape historian, she has taught in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington since 2007, where she also served as the founding Executive Director of Urban@UW from 2014-2019. Dr. Way’s publications have focused on the questions of history, gender, and shaping the landscape with a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. Her book, ‘Unbounded Practices: Women, Landscape Architecture, and Early Twentieth-Century Design’ (2009, University of Virginia Press) was awarded the J.B. Jackson Book Award. Her book ‘From Modern Space to Urban Ecological Design: the Landscape Architecture of Richard Haag’ (UW Press, 2015) explores the narrative of post-industrial cities and the practice of landscape architecture. She had edited ‘River Cities/ City Rivers’ (Harvard University Press, 2018), a collection of essays on the environmental history of important urban settlements; ‘Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here’ (Routledge, 2014), with co-editors Ken Yocom, Ben Spencer, and Jeff Hou; and GGN 1999-2018’ (Timber Press, 2018), written in collaboration with the designers. She is completing the monograph, Landscape Architect A.E. Bye: Sculpting the Earth’. Currently Dr. Way is focused on a broad effort to challenge the canon of landscape architecture to engage with the inscriptions of race, gender, and class on the profession, practice, and pedagogy of the field.