Lisa Brawley
Lisa Brawley's scholarship and teaching focus on the interdisciplinary study of urbanism and urbanization in the United States, with a current focus on design and the just city. She is author, with Elsa Devienne, of a bilingual book on Frederick Law Olmsted and agricultural modernity, D’après Nature: Frederick Law Olmsted et le Park Movement Américain (Paris: L’Edition Fahrenheit, 2014). Her courses include Introduction to Urban Studies, Empire/City, Urban Theory, Gender and Social Space, Visual Urbanism, Critical+Social Design, and the City in Fragments. In Spring 2019, she is collaborating with Sara Hendren on a senior urban studies seminar, “Design, Disability, and the Demos: Critical Access Studies and the Right to the City.” She received her doctorate as a Whiting Fellow from the University of Chicago and joined Vassar’s Urban Studies Program in 2000.
Lisa Brawley received her PhD as a Whiting Fellow from the University of Chicago and joined Vassar’s Urban Studies Program in 2000. She currently serves as Tatlock Chair of Multidisciplinary Studies.
She works in the fields of critical urban studies, feminist theory, and American Studies. Her scholarship and teaching engage processes of capitalist urbanization in the long 20th century in the U.S. She is author, with Elsa Devienne, of a bilingual book on Frederick Law Olmsted and agricultural modernity, D’après Nature: Frederick Law Olmsted et le Park Movement Américain (Paris: L’Edition Fahrenheit, 2014). She has also written on urban food systems and food sovereignty; boomtown suburbanization on Guantanamo Bay; spatial justice and neoliberal urbanization; the visual registers of everyday urbanism; and the role of photography and cinema in the 1969 Plan of New York City.
Her courses include Introduction to Urban Studies, Empire/City, Urban Theory, Gender and Social Space, Visual Urbanism, Media Theory, Critical+Social Design, and with Heesok Chang, the City in Fragments. In 2013, she served as resident director of the Vassar London Program, where she taught the field-based course, Tactical Urbanism: London.
Departments and Programs
Courses
URBS 100 Introduction to Urban Studies
