Maura Lucking is a historian of architectural modernism and the nineteenth century U.S. She is interested in design as the intersection of connected histories of race, craft, land, and labor. Her book project, Settler Campus, provides an architectural history of the Land Grant college movement. In it, she studies the relationship between government policy, land use, campus planning, and design pedagogy at schools founded after the U.S. Civil War, considering the role of design practices in Black and Native dispossession as well as the construction of new racial identities and settler colonial hierarchies. Another interest is in sociotechnical and media histories of architectural representation, including mechanical drawing & blueprinting, architectural photography, and mortgage and loan documents. New research considers the paperwork practices of state and philanthropic institutions organizing homebuilding projects in Indian country. Her scholarly work has been supported by the Winterthur Museum, the Huntington Library, the Graham Foundation, the Society for Architectural Historians, and the Getty Research Institute and has appeared in Grey Room, the Getty Research Journal, Thresholds, Faktur, and the Journal of Architectural Education. She holds a BA from Boston College, an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD in architectural history from UCLA where her dissertation was awarded the 2024 David B. Brownlee Dissertation Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.

Lucking began at Columbia on January 1, 2024. As part of the Buell Fellowship, she joined the Society of Fellows and the GSAPP faculty team teaching the landmark course, “Questions in Architectural History.”