Gwendolyn Wright is a professor of architecture in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. Upon receiving tenure in 1986, she became the first tenured woman in the school. Wright served as the director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture from 1988 to 1992.

Wright has received fellowships from numerous institutions, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center and the Ford Foundation. In 1985, she was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians, which honors literary quality in America history writing. She also has been made a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians, the highest honor in that field. She was named an Outstanding Alumnus from the University of California at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, where she received her Master of Architecture and doctorate.

Wright is the author or editor of six books. Her most recent, USA (2008),is part of Reaktion Books’ international series, Modern Architectures in History, that presents the distinctive narratives of 25 different nations. Wright also is the author of The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (1991) and Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913 (1980). Her book Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (1981) is now in its 17th printing and being translated into Chinese. She also has had many articles published in scholarly books and journals, as well as newspapers around the world. She focuses primarily on the interconnections between architecture, urbanism and political culture from the late 19th century to the present. Her special interests are the history and future of American housing; contrasts between popular and professional “urban imaginaries"; and trans-national patterns of architecture and urbanism, especially colonial and post-colonial design.

She currently is writing an article on the history of American affordable housing for Cityscape, the journal of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and a book on the topic with Abby Hamlin, a developer of affordable housing.

Since 2001, Wright also has been one of the five hosts for the PBS television series History Detectives. Addressing a general audience, but also admired by specialists, the program uses physical artifacts to explain the processes and pleasures of historical research, including the likelihood of ambiguous or conflicting evidence. By 2012, when the format was changed, it was the third most widely viewed show on PBS.

Wright is the keynote speaker for the Southeast Society of Architectural Historians Conference, which is being hosted by the Fay Jones School of Architecture. She will present her lecture at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 30 in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville. 

The lecture is free and open to the public.