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Mary Corbin Sies

Graduate students in American Studies will find professors from a diversity of disciplines from among our substantial group of faculty affiliates.

In summer 2006, Assistant Professor Psyche Williams-Forson published her first book, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs, University of North Carolina Press

Learn more about the graduate students of American Studies

Associate Professor and
Director of Graduate Studies
301.405.1361
marycorbinsies@yahoo.com
http://otal.umd.edu/~sies

Mary Corbin Sies is Director of Graduate Studies and an Associate Professor in the department. She is Co-Director (with Psyche Williams-Forson) of the Material Culture/Visual Culture Working Group,
currently housed in the Department of American Studies. She is also an affiliate faculty member of the Women's Studies Department, the African American Studies Department, the Theatre and Performance Studies graduate program, the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education, and a member of the Historic Preservation faculty. Her research and teaching interests span material culture studies, planning history, architectural history, urban history, and cultural and social history of the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is an authority on American suburbs from 1850 to the present, particularly planned, exclusive suburbs and the cultural landscapes, values, and lifeways established by their upper-middle class white residents. She is working on a collaborative project with historian Andrew Wiese of San Diego State University to investigate and map the relationships between Black and White suburbs in North American metropolitan areas between 1900 and 1950. She is the recipient with Isabelle Gournay of the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation of a grant from the Maryland Historical Trust to survey the Modern Movement in Maryland (MOMOMA); she and Professor Gournay are writing a history of modern architecture in the state.  With Angel David Nieves, she is co-editing an anthology of new work theorizing and seeking best practices in heritage tourism.

Professor Sies is interested in theorizing and studying issues of race, gender, space, and the domestic built environment and processes of community-building. She is also actively engaged in rethinking the theory and practice of historic preservation to center on the tangible and intangible heritage of marginalized subgroups in the United States. Professor Sies is an avid follower of the developing field of cyberculture studies and employs information technologies extensively in her teaching. She is a member of a collaborative community-based learning project called Virtual Greenbelt and a supporter of MITH, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.  She maintains an active interest in issues of professionalization and graduate study, especially with preparing students to compete for positions in academe and in various kinds of cultural resource management positions. Please visit the Academic Job Resource Pages on her website (listed above).  Mary promotes advocacy and social justice in her scholarship and her teaching.

Degrees:

Ph.D. American Culture (University of Michigan, 1987)
A.M. American Culture (University of Michigan, 1977)
A.B. European History (Michigan State University, 1974)

Publications:

• “The Modern Movement in Maryland: research contexts, issues, and methodologies” (with Isabelle Gournay).  Forthcoming in Proceedings of the VIIIth International DOCOMOMO Conference, Import-Export: Postwar Modernism in an Expanding World, 1945-1975.
• “Regenerating Scholarship on Race and the Built Environment.” in Proceedings, Reconceptualizing the History of the Built Environment in North America, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/%7Ecwc/builtenv/papers.html.  November 2005.
• “North American Urban History: The Everyday Politics and Spatial Logics of Metropolitan Life,”  Urban History Review/Revue d’histoire XXXII (1), (Fall 2003): 27-41.
• "Letting Our Guard Down: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Planning History," with Gail Dubrow, Journal of Planning History 1(3), (forthcoming September, 2002): 201-212.
• "Using a Virtual Museum for Collaborative Teaching, Research, and Service." With Jo Paoletti and Virginia Jenkins. Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities: Issues and Options. Ed. James A. Inman and Cheryl Reed. (forthcoming from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.)
• "North American Suburbs, 1880-1950: Cultural and Social Reconsiderations," Journal of Urban History 27 (March 2001): 313-346.
• "Moving Beyond Scholarly Orthodoxies in North American Suburban History," Journal of Urban History 27 (March 2001): 355-361.
• The American Suburban Ideal: A Cultural Strategy for Modern Middle-Class Living, 1877-1917. (In final revisions for Temple University Press)
• Planning the American City Since 1900. Ed. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001 (Second Printing).
• Planning the Twentieth-Century American City. Ed Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
• "George W. Maher's Planning and Architecture in Kenilworth, Illinois: An Inquiry into the Ideology of Arts and Crafts Design." The Substance of Style: Perspectives on the American Arts and Crafts Movement. Ed. Bert Denker. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1996. 415-445.
• "Toward a Performance Theory of the Suburban Ideal, 1877-1917." Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture IV. Ed. Thomas Carter and Bernard Herman. Columbia, Mo: University of Missouri Press, 1991. 197-207.
• "'God's Very Kingdom on the Earth': The Design Program for the American Suburban Home, 1877-1917." Modern Architecture in America: Visions and Revisions. Ed. Richard Guy Wilson and Sidney K. Robinson. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1991. 2-31.
• "The Domestic Mission of the Privileged American Suburban Homemaker, 1877-1917: A Reassessment." Making the American Home: Middle Class Women and Domestic Material Culture, 1840-1940. Ed. Pat Browne and Marilyn Ferris Motz. Bowling Green, OH: The Popular Press, 1988. 192-209.
• "The City Transformed: Nature, Technology, and the Suburban Ideal, 1877-1917." Journal of Urban History 14 (November 1987). 81-111.

Courses Taught:

American Suburbia (undergraduate)
Material Aspects of American Life (undergraduate)
Interpretation of Cultural Landscapes (graduate)
Material Culture Studies Theory (graduate)
Current Approaches to American Studies (graduate)
Interdisciplinary Research Strategies and Bibliographic Instruction (graduate)

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