Morgan Newman

Morgan Newman is a Ph.D. candidate in Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. She is broadly interested in exploring ideas of repair and reparations through the implementation of novel architectural and spatial methods to reclaim silenced histories and narratives of Black life. Her dissertation, currently titled "Reconstructions of Black Life," visualizes the ecological and material afterlives of slavery in Alabama’s Black Belt region by using transdisciplinary methods of spatial, historical, and ethnographic reconstructions to identify locations of former plantations along the Alabama River and highlight forms of Black eco-spatial resistance that arose following emancipation. Her work draws from Black feminist theories/geographies, critical archival studies, the architectural humanities, and decolonial studies. Her project aims to contribute to calls for [architectural/ecological/archival] repair by proposing an architectural framework that tends to, what Christina Sharpe defines as, the "wake" of slavery.

She received her Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy and Sociology from Vanderbilt University in 2019 and her Master of Science in Public Policy and Management from Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon in 2022. She is a GEM University Fellow and a 2023–24 Steinbrenner Fellow. She was a Fulbright Scholar to Cyprus in 2020.

Research Interests

• Architectural humanities
• Decolonial studies 
• Critical archival studies

Teaching

• 48-699 – Environmental Racism, Injustice and Unfreedom: Lessons for Architects and Designers
• 48-627 – Exploring "Afterlives" as Architectural Practice