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Past Catherine W. Bishir Prize Winners
2024
The 2024 winner of the Catherine W. Bishir Prize is Joseph Sciorra for “‘The Strange Artistic Genius of This People’: The Ephemeral Art and Impermanent Architecture of Italian Immigrant Catholic Feste,” published in the Fall/Spring 2023 issue of the VAF’s own journal, Buildings & Landscapes. read more
2023The 2023 winner of the Catherine W. Bishir Prize is Valentina Davila for her article "Altars of Hope: Venezuelan Domestic Workers and the Material Culture of the Divine," which appears in the Spring 2022 edition of Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. Davila is part of the small but growing cohort of VAF-ers who are expanding scholarship beyond U.S.-built environments. read more
2022
The 2022 winner of the Catherine W. Bishir Prize is Ryan K. Smith for his article "Disappearing the Enslaved: The Destruction and Recovery of Richmond’s Second African Burial Ground," which appears in the Spring 2020 edition of Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. read more
2021Marta Gutman, “Intermediate School 201: Race, Space, and Modern Architecture in Harlem,” in Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, edited by Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell (Columbia University Press, 2019).183-209. read more
2020
Michael J. Chiarappa “Working the Delaware Estuary: African American Cultural Landscapes and the Contours of Environmental Experience,” Buildings & Landscapes 25:1 (Spring 2018), 64-91.
Andrea R. Roberts “‘Until the Lord Come Get Me, It Burn Down, Or the Next Storm Blow it Away’: The Aesthetics of Freedom in African American Vernacular Homestead Preservation” Buildings & Landscapes 26:2 (Fall 2019), 73-97.
2019
Maire O’Neill Conrad, “Light on the Land: Construction Revolution in Farm Buildings of the Northern Rockies, 1890-1910,” Buildings & Landscapes 24:2 (Fall 2017), 58-84.
Gabrielle Berlinger, “From Ritual to Protest: Sukkot in the Garden of Hope,” Buildings & Landscapes 24:1 (Spring 2017), 1-25.
2018
Becky Nicolaides and James Zarsadiaz, “Design Assimilation in Suburbia: Asian Americans, Built Landscapes, and Suburban Advantage in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley since 1970,” Journal of Urban History 43:2 (2017), 332-371. read more
2017
Sarah L. Lopez, “Putting Vista Hermosa ‘On the Map’: Migrant Boosterism in Distant Homelands,” in Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration, edited by Mirjana Lozanovska (Routledge, 2016), 81-98.
Margaret Grubiak, “An Architecture for the Electronic Church: Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” Technology and Culture 57:2 (April 2016), 380-413.
read more2016
Catherine Boland Erkkila, 'American Railways and the Cultural Landscapes of Immigration' Buildings & Landscapes 22:1 (Spring 2015): 36-62 read more
2015
Louis Nelson, 'Architectures of West African Enslavement.' Buildings & Landscapes 21:1 (Spring 2014): 88-125 read more
2014
Amber Wiley, 'The Dunbar High School Dilemma: Architecture, Power, and African-American Cultural Heritage.' Buildings & Landscapes 20:1 (Spring 2013): 95-128 read more
2013
2012
Janet Ore, "Mobile Home Syndrome: Engineered Woods and the Making of a New Domestic Ecology in the Post–WW II Era," Technology and Culture 52:2 (April 2011): 260-286.
The Bishir Prize was awarded for the first time in 2012.