Nancy Levinson is the editor and executive director of Places Journal, where she leads work at the crossroads of journalism, scholarship, architecture and urbanism.

Levinson will present a lecture at 12 p.m. Monday, Sept. 22, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the U of A campus as part of the fall 2025 lecture series in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

This lecture is presented in partnership with the University of Arkansas Libraries.

Levinson’s lecture, “Library: An Infrastructure of Generosity,” will focus on the public library as an essential form of social infrastructure as exhibited in the library curated by Places for PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity.

The lecture will explore the curatorial vision behind the PORCH library, in which “libraries are social infrastructure,” and how the Places team sought to merge this with the concept of the PORCH as “an unheralded American icon of architectural character… the architecture of social negotiation and cultural exchange, where private lives interweave with public life, where relationships are calibrated, where we reach out to the neighborhood and interact with civic life.”

Levinson’s talk also will focus on the library — in particular, the public library — as an essential form of social infrastructure. In doing so, she will build upon three substantial Places articles: “Library as Infrastructure” and “Fugitive Libraries,” both by the media scholar Shannon Mattern, and “Public Library: An American Commons,” with text by Places editor Josh Wallaert and photographs by Robert Dawson.

Using examples of library programs and projects around the United States, she will explore Mattern’s proposition that we understand the library as “a network of integrated, mutually reinforcing, evolving infrastructures — in particular, architectural, technological, social, epistemological and ethical infrastructures.”

Places Journal is a free, nonprofit online publication dedicated to architecture, landscape and urbanism. Committed to public scholarship, it tackles pressing issues such as climate change, inequality and democracy. Its content spans essays, criticism, photography, narrative journalism and peer-reviewed scholarship.

Since arriving at the journal in 2009, Levinson has led the transition from print to digital, advanced the editorial mission of public scholarship, overseen the launch of Places Books and received numerous foundation grants to support editorial content. She received a B.A. from Yale University and Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.

A frequent design juror and lecturer, Nancy has written for a range of design periodicals, including Architectural Record, Landscape Architecture Magazine, the Journal of Planning Literature, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Perspecta and Metropolis. She was awarded a fellowship as “editor in the archives” at the Canadian Center for Architecture, and, in an earlier professional life, was a practicing architect.

Previously, Levinson was founding director of the Phoenix Urban Research Lab at The Design School at Arizona State University, and before that, co-founding editor of Harvard Design Magazine at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She has served as an adjunct associate professor at Monash Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, at Monash University.

The school is pursuing continuing education credits for this lecture through the American Institute of Architects

This lecture is free and open to the public. Seating is limited.