Melissa Rovner

Melissa Rovner is an educator and historian of the built environment. Her research focuses on intersections between material, labor, housing design, urban development, representation, and the formation of racial constructs in the production of spatial inequalities. She leverages forms of narrative and visualization in the urban humanities, such as “rebel archives,” “critical cartography,” and “digital thick mapping,” to influence the recovery of cultures and histories that were mischaracterized, displaced, condemned, or erased in the making of an Anglo-European vision of civilization under discourses of modernity and progress. Her scholarship bridges temporal and geographic boundaries, from global colonial translations of land and property through buildings and plans in the sixteenth–eighteenth century, to American Imperial expansionism in the nineteenth century and the uneven development of US cities at the start of the twentieth century.