Kathryn E. Holliday

Kathryn E. Holliday

Kathryn E. Holliday, PhD, is the Randall Biallas Professor of Historic Preservation and American Architectural History and Professor of Landscape Architecture. She 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 pursuit of projects that promote a fuller, more equitable narrative of American history is central to her work. She is author/editor of four books, including most recently Rewriting American Architecture: Contesting the Myths of National Culture (University of Texas Press, 2026).  She is currently at work on the book Telephone City: Architecture and the Rise and Fall of the Bell Monopoly, a critical analysis of telecommunications infrastructure and design in the service of the largest monopoly in the history of the U.S. She also served as co-curator of the 2025 exhibition Making Place for the Arts at Home: Performance and Mid-Century Modern Architecture at the Krannert Art Museum, and continues to work with students and community members to nominate and document unrecognized landmarks and landscapes in Illinois and across the U.S.

Professor Holliday is a Public Voices Fellow in the 2026-27 cohort of the Op-Ed Project, where she will be focused on issues of local governance and community participation in preservation. She is also a core contributor to the 2025-27 Sawyer Seminar At Risk U, funded by the Mellon Foundation, where she is working on issues related to property ownership and maintenance in land grant universities. Her work has also been supported by the 2020 SOM Foundation Research Prize, a National Park Service Civil Rights Grant, and grants from the Kress Foundation and Hagley Library amongst others. In 2023, she was a Mellon Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. She is a member of the Heritage Conservation committee of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and has served on its publications committee. She is a past member of the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education, and currently represents the University of Illinois on the Places Journal Academic Partner Council. She is a member of the Urbana Historic Preservation Commission, and served on the State Board of Review for National Register Programs for the Texas Historical Commission for six years, serving as its vice chair. She was a member of the Board of Advisors for the Deans’ Equity and Inclusion Initiative, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, for the six years of its existence.

Before moving to Illinois in 2023, she taught for 16 years at the University of Texas at Arlington in Dallas-Fort Worth, where she directed the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture and inaugurated its successful Dillon Symposium series on subjects ranging from architecture criticism to Freedman’s Towns, preservation, and urban history. For her work with the center, she received the Flowers Award for Excellence in Promotion of Architecture through the Media from the Texas Society of Architects and the Texas Historical Commission’s Award for Excellence in Media.

Professor Holliday is currently Chair of the PhD programs in Architecture and Landscape Architecture and Chair of the Graduate Minor in Cultural Heritage and Preservation. She also serves as the Program Chair for History + Theory + Preservation in the School of Architecture.