About Kathryn E. Holliday
Kathryn E. Holliday
Professor Holliday is an architecture and landscape historian with a strong commitment to community-engaged, place-based historic preservation. Creating connections between the university, faculty, and students in the pursuit of projects that promote a fuller, more equitable narrative of American history is central to her work. As a scholar and teacher, she draws on her interdisciplinary training in architecture, art history, environmental studies, and museum work to bridge the specialized internal questions of the design disciplines with public narratives. She is driven by a core interest in authorship and storytelling, and the ways that buildings and landscapes intertwine stories of labor, technology, capital, gender, and race to shape the world around us.
She joined the faculty at Illinois in Fall 2023 and is completing the book Telephone City: Architecture and the Rise and Fall of the Bell Monopoly, supported by a Mellon Fellowship in Urban Landscape Studies from Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC (2022-23).
Education
- Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, Architecture (2003)
- MA, University of Texas at Austin, Art History (1994)
- BA, Williams College, Art and Environmental Studies (1991)
Research and publications
Selected publications
Diane Allen, Kathryn Holliday, and Austin Allen, co-authors. Reclaiming Black Settlements: A Design Playbook for Historic Communities in the Shadow of Sprawl. Under contract with Island Press.
Kathryn Holliday. “The Architect at Mid-Century: The AIA and the Settings for Architecture Education: 1857 and 1957.” In Peter Laurence (Ed.), Histories of Architecture Education in the United States. London: Routledge, 2023
Kathryn Holliday. "Making the Woods for the Little Chapel: The Native Landscape Movement and Modern Architecture in Texas" in Wilfried Wang, ed., The Little Chapel in the Woods. Tubingen, Germany: Wasmuth & Zohlen, 2021.
Kathryn Holliday. The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture. University of Texas Press, 2019. Winner of the Texas Historical Commission’s Award for Excellence in Media 2020.
Kathryn Holliday. “Building a National Network: The Architecture of Telephone Buildings in the United States.” Archipedia, Society of Architectural Historians, 2020. https://sah-archipedia.org/essays/TH-01-ART-007
Kathryn Holliday, & Colleen Casey “Urban Sprawl, Social Media and the Town Hall Square as a Symbol for Civic Culture,” Moderne Stadtgeschichte (2019): 89–103.
Kathryn Holliday. Ralph Walker: Architect of the Century. Exhibition catalog. Rizzoli, 2012.
Kathryn Holliday. Leopold Eidlitz: Architecture and Idealism in the Gilded Age. W. W. Norton, 2008. Winner of annual book awards from the Victorian Society Metropolitan Chapter (New York) and SESAH (Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians), 2009.