SAH Fellows

2020 Class of Fellows

Alice T. Friedman

Alice T. Friedman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor of American Art at Wellesley College. She is the author of three books highlighting the relationship among gender, sexuality, architecture, and design, including House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (University of Chicago Press, 1989), Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (Abrams, 1998; Yale paperback 2007) and American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (Yale, 2010).

Friedman’s numerous grants and awards include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Arcus-Places Prize for Scholarship on Gender, Sexuality and the Built Environment (2014). In 1990–92, she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, and in 2004–05 she participated in a year-long seminar on the built environment at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard. Last Spring, she served as Rea S. Hederman Critic in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.

Trained as a Renaissance historian, Friedman has utilized the interdisciplinary, feminist methodology developed by scholars in that field to shape her research on U.S. and Modern architecture. She has published articles on individual and corporate patronage, and on Midcentury Modern sculpture and installation. In 2015, she co-edited a special issue of Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture on "Spaces of Faith" which included her article on Richard Lippold’s collaborations with John Cage. Recent publications, including “Max Ewing’s Closet and Queer Architectural History” (Platform, October 2019), highlight the role of queer and gender-non-conforming clients in creating alternative living spaces in European and American cities and suburbs. Friedman’s current book project explores the typology of 20^th- and 21^st-century “poker-faced” houses, living spaces which—though often modern in plan, section and program—use a variety of design strategies to conceal more than they reveal.

Friedman has been a member of SAH since 1975. She has served on the SAH Board of Directors (1990–1993), as well as the SAH Nominating Committee (1991–1992) and the Spiro Kostof Book Award Committee (2010). In 2010 she delivered the Plenary Talk at the SAH 68^th Annual International Conference in Chicago, "A Sense of the Past," which was published in the December 2010 issue of JSAH.

In addition to writing numerous JSAH book reviews between 1979 and 2014, Friedman has published groundbreaking articles in the Journal including “Frank Lloyd Wright and Feminism: Mamah Borthwick’s Letters to Ellen Key” (June 2002) and “The Way You Do The Things You Do: Writing the History of Houses and Housing” (September 1999).

Mary McLeod

Mary McLeod is a professor of architecture at Columbia University, where she teaches architecture history and theory. She has also taught at Yale University, Harvard University, University of Kentucky, University of Miami, and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. She received her B.A., M.Arch., and Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her research and publications have focused on the history of the modern movement and on contemporary architecture theory, examining issues concerning the connections between architecture and politics. She is co-editor of Architecture, Criticism, Ideology and Architecture Reproduction, and is the editor of and contributor to the book Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living (Abrams, 2003). She also initiated and helped curate the exhibition Charlotte Perriand: Interior Equipment, held at the Urban Center in New York. Presently, she is co-editing a website for the Beverly Willis Architectural Foundation on pioneering American women architects. Her articles and book reviews have appeared in journals, including Assemblage, Oppositions, Art Journal, AA Files, JSAH, Casabella, Art Journal, Harvard Design Magazine, Lotus, and Journal of Architecture and books, such as Complexity and Contradiction at Fifty, Food and the City, Walls of Color, Architecture School, The Sex of Architecture, Architecture in Fashion, Architecture of the Everyday, Architecture and Feminism, The Pragmatist Imagination, The State of Architecture, Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished, Architecture Theory since 1968, Oppositions Reader, Le Parole dell’Architettura, Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art, and Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes. She has received several fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship, NEH award, Arnold W. Brunner award, as well as grants from New York Council of the Arts and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

McLeod has been a member of SAH since 1984. She has served on the SAH Board of Directors (1994–1997) and the SAH Nominating Committees (1986–1987 and 1987–1988) and has presented papers at numerous SAH annual conference over the years.

Leland M. Roth

Born in 1943 in Harbor Beach, Michigan, Roth spent more than a half-century teaching the history of architecture. While studying architectural design at the University of Illinois (1961–1966) he also studied the history of architecture with such eminent historians as Alan K. Laing (a founder of SAH), Ernest A. Connally (first director of the National Park Service’s Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation), and Hermann J. G. Pundt. After his fifth undergraduate year, he taught the concluding class in modern architectural history.  

At Yale University, he studied primarily with the late Vincent Scully, earning a M. Phil. (1971) and a Ph.D. in 1973, then taught art history at the Ohio State University before moving to Northwestern University (1973–1978) where he taught modern architectural history. In 1978 he was chosen to replace the retiring Marion Dean Ross at the University of Oregon and became full professor in 1991.  Upon the receipt of Ross’s substantial bequest to Oregon’s History of Art and Architectural Department in 1992, Roth was designated the Marion Dean Ross Distinguished Professor and joined various other faculty to create the University’s Graduate Program in Historic Preservation.  In addition to continuing the full range of courses in modern, post-Baroque architecture formerly taught by Prof. Ross, Roth picked up Ross’s more specialized course on the architecture of Oregon and also introduced a course covering the architecture of Native North Americans from pre-contact times to the start of the twentieth century. 

Roth became well known throughout the architectural history and American studies world through his many books, including the re-issue of A Monograph of the Work of McKim, Mead & White, 1879–1915 (four volumes in one, with new material by Roth and produced by several successive publishers, 1973, 1977, and 2018); The Architecture of McKim, Mead & White, 1870–1920: A Building List (New York: Garland, 1978); A Concise History of American Architecture (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); followed by America Builds: Source Documents in American Architecture and Planning (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).  Roth returned to his principal focus, producing the comprehensive McKim, Mead & White, Architects (New York: Harper & Row, 1983). Books that followed include Understanding Architecture: Its Elements, History and Meaning (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), reissued in greatly enlarged new editions in 2007, and in 2014 with co-author Amanda C.R. Clark, and translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Turkish; a fourth edition is underway. He rewrote and enlarged his Concise History to become his American Architecture: A History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), reissued in a new edition in 2015 with coauthor Amanda C.R. Clark.

Roth has published many scholarly journal articles, among them “Three Industrial Towns by McKim, Mead & White,” which won SAH’s 1980 Founders’ Award. A member of SAH since 1970, Roth has served as a Board Member of SAH (1978–81) and delivered numerous papers at SAH annual conferences. He taught in the annual Preservation Field School offered by the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts (now the College of Design), from the program’s beginning in 1995 until partial retirement in 2010. He continued to teach a reduced schedule of his favorite courses through 2014. Presently, he and his daughter, Amanda Clark, are collaborating to research and write the Oregon building entries for SAH Archipedia.

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FELLOWS OF THE SOCIETY OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS