Visual Arts & Design

Paula Lupkin is a historian of design, architecture, and cities.  She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 and taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Washington University in St. Louis before moving to the University of North Texas in 2012. As faculty in the Department of Art Education and Art, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of architecture, interiors, and furniture, as well as the social role of design and the designer, issues of race, gender, class and space in American cities, and cross-cultural exchange in the histories of art and architecture.

Dr. Lupkin’s interdisciplinary work focuses on the spatial production of modernity under capitalism, investigating its impact on the designed world and the built environment. Her research and publications, including her first book, Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), address the ways that architecture, interiors, cities, and landscapes shaped and were shaped by new ways of living, working, designing, and consuming. This book, as well as current projects on architectural and cultural networks in the American Southwest and the history of the interior design profession in the United States, have been supported by the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin,  the Texas State Historical Association, the Clements Center for Southwestern Studies at Southern Methodist University, and the UNT I-GRO Program. She serves on the board of the Vernacular Architecture Forum and is co-program chair for the Society of City and Regional Planning History’s biennial meeting in Los Angeles in 2015.