Calvin Nguyen Awarded the 2023 Tompkins Fellowship

The Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to name Calvin Nguyen, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, as the 2023 HABS-SAH Sally Kress Tompkins Fellow. The Sally Kress Tompkins Fellowship, a joint program of SAH and the National Park Service’s Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), permits a graduate student in architectural history or a related field the opportunity to work on a 12-week HABS history project. Nguyen's fellowship project will focus on Los Angeles’s Chinatown.

Nguyen will graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s Historic Preservation, MSHP program in spring 2023 with a concentration on public history in the built environment. He completed his master’s thesis on Philadelphia’s Little Saigon neighborhood and the relationships between its built environment and Vietnamese American heritage. Nguyen received his BA in American Studies from University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include ethnic vernacular built environments, commercial architecture, public spaces, sites of public memory, and heritage tourism. Through his work he seeks to both highlight the significance of the built environment to identity-making, public memory, and community, as well as employ preservation strategies to serve current communities and their needs. Though he is currently seeking a role in preservation practice, Nguyen plans to pursue a PhD in architectural history in the future.