Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory, Department of Architecture
Both in her teaching and scholarship, Mary N. Woods, an architectural and urban historian, studies how film, photography, and other media shape and mediate our experience and understanding of space and the built environment as well as the design and making of cities and landscapes across time and cultures. Woods's Beyond the Architect's Eye: Photographs of the American Built Environment explores tradition and modernity in New York City, the American South, and Miami through different photographic genres. First published in 2009, Penn Press will bring out a paperback edition in spring 2014. Beyond the Architect's Eye received subventions from the Graham Foundation, Andrew Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publications, Clarence Stein Institute, AAP, and Cornell architecture. Woods is also the author of From Craft to Profession (1999) and other essays and articles. She has won fellowships from the Buell Center, Fulbright, ACLS, and Georgia O'Keeffe Research Center. Woods has just completed a manuscript on the history of women architects in Delhi and Mumbai from the independence struggle to the present day. And, she is at work on a film and book about cinema halls and the immigrant experience in India and beyond with Delhi film maker Vani Subramanian, a Fulbright fellow at Cornell for 2013-2014. Woods recently served as an advisor for the UNESCO nomination of south Mumbai's Victorian and Art Deco districts as a world heritage site. Her next project is a publication and exhibit on urban ruins in shrinking and exploding cities from the global north and south since the 1960s. Known for her teaching with colleagues from film, information science, Olin Library, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Woods led a seminar at the Johnson Museum with curator Andrew Weislogel where her students curated an exhibit, Projecting Cities, in dialogue with his show Mirror of the City: The Printed View in Italy and Beyond. She has organized many other interdisciplinary conferences, lecture series, film programs, and exhibitions at Cornell.
Contact: (607) 255-6416
mnw5@cornell.edu