Maria Taylor

Maria C. Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University.

As an interdisciplinary scholar and historian of North America and the “Second World,” she examines how culture, urbanism, modernization, and professional design practice mutually influence society-nature relations in the modern era. Her current research and writing focuses in particular on the transnational history of urban greening, industrialization, and environmental politics, particularly in Siberia, Central Asia, and other regions of the then Soviet Union. By bringing insights about Soviet and socialist cities and environmental relations into conversations that have historically foregrounded First World examples, this work contributes to a larger cross-disciplinary project of recognizing diverse, global histories of modernity and place-making.

Taylor has presented papers at national and international conferences including the Society of Architectural Historians, the American Society of Environmental Historians, the Society of American City and Regional Planning Historians, and the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. In 2022-23 she was a Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities, after previously having taught landscape history and urban planning at the University of Washington College of Built Environments in Seattle. Her research has also been supported by the Fulbright IIE program, a Mellon Fellowship in Urban Landscapes at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C., and the Social Science Research Council DPDF and IDRF grants.

Taylor’s current book manuscipt, Civic Engineering: The Soviet Dream of Green Cities examines the history of urban environmental design, greening, and environmental politics in the USSR, focusing on the mutual influence of urbanism, modernism, and environmentalism from the 1930s through the 1960s. Her teaching interests include the history of global and North American landscape design and urban planning; the history and theory of industrial and post-industrial site design/remediation; the art, material culture and everyday politics of the Cold War; international and US environmental history (particularly of the Rockies and intermountain West), and spatial history/cartography. 

Recent Publications:

• “To Eradicate the Vestiges:” Ivan Nikolaev and the Green Reconstruction of Soviet Factories, 1933-1938” in Detroit–Moscow–Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917–1945, edited by Jean-Louis Cohen, Christina C. Crawford and Claire Zimmerman. MIT Press, 2023.
• “Green Infrastructure or Civic Engineering?” Roundtable: Rethinking the Urban Landscape. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians September 2022; 81(3): 268–298.