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Past Catherine W. Bishir Prize Winners
2026
The 2026 Catherine W. Bishir Prize recipient is Dr. Willa Granger, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Florida Atlantic University for her article "Consuming Care: The Americana Corporation and the Advent of the Modern Nursing Home,” in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 84, no. 3 (September 2025): 386-411.
This article models superlative research, analysis, and argumentation, making a powerful case that architecture has been a central tool for prioritizing profit in the United States’ mixed public-private approach to eldercare, with timely implications for the social safety net more broadly. Dr. Willa Granger assembled an impressive range of primary archival material charting not only the development of a single corporate nursing home developer, the Americana Corporation, but also the transition of eldercare architecture from earlier domestic settings. She meaningfully contextualized this transition in a truly formidable range of literature both theoretical and topical including institutional and health facility design, hotel and boardinghouse histories, popular neoclassical-style roadside architecture, and the shifting federal and state regulatory and funding landscape of the mid twentieth century. Granger’s analysis features a robust consideration of scale, moving from large regional mapping, to urban and neighborhood geography, to site and architectural plan, all the way into individual nursing home rooms and furnishings. Most importantly, she used interior viewshed analysis and first-hand accounts to consider the embodied experiences of residents, nurses, and other employees, ensuring rich consideration of populations often overlooked in institutional histories. Overall, Granger’s work adds to the vitality of vernacular architecture studies with astute analysis of architectural space, design, and the human experience.
2025
The 2025 winners of the Catherine W. Bishir Prize are:
Hongyan Yang, Core Fellow and visiting assistant professor in history, digital humanities, and comparative migration and ethnic studies at Boston College, for their paper, "Homemaking in White America: The Jue Joe Ranch, 1919–1958," Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, 31, no. 2, (Fall 2024): 5-29.
Perri Meldon, PhD candidate in Boston University's American & New England Studies Program, for their article “Tubman’s Blackwater: Wading through Public History at a Wildlife Refuge,” The Public Historian 46, no. 3 (August 2024): 63-84.
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
The 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.