Melissa Rovner

Melissa Rovner is a historian, educator, and scholar of the built environment. Her research focuses on intersections between labor management, urban development, and modernity/coloniality in the production of environmental inequalities, and the potential for alternative forms of research, representation, and design to influence inclusive cultural recovery. Her research on labor exploitation and uneven development practices has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Enquiry and the Journal of Planning History, and has been presented at SAH and ACSA conferences. Rovner’s teaching and digital humanities projects have received support from the Mellon Foundation, including a Teaching Innovation Grant at UCLA and a Digital Humanities Fellowship with the Chicago History Museum and Lake Forest College. She received her PhD in the History of Architecture and Urban Design with a certificate in Urban Humanities from UCLA in 2023, and is currently conducting research on equity in heritage conservation as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago.