Jessica Sewell

Education

University of California, Berkeley, PhD
Parsons School of Design and the New School for Social Research, MA in Architecture and Design Criticism
Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, BA

Biography

Jessica Sewell’s research focuses on the relationships between gender and architecture, urban space, and material culture. 

Her new book, Exploring Gender in Vernacular Architecture (University of Tennessee Press, 2025) explores the gender of those who create and shape spaces, how gender ideology contributes to and manifests itself in built form, and what research methods make the observation of gendered experience possible. It discusses single-gender, mixed-gender, and queer spaces, providing a comprehensive look at how gender influences the design and construction of those spaces, how those spaces are used, and the relationship between gender and the broader cultural landscape.  

Her first book Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) explores how gendered public spaces were imagined, built, and used between 1890 and 1915, making visible the interdependence between changes in the everyday lives of women, the urban cultural landscape, and gender ideology. 

Her main current research looks at the question of men in private space, focusing on the bachelor pad as a site of masculine fantasy and an urbanized counterpoint to the suburban home in the 1950s-60s United States. She is also at work on a collaborative book on the architect and urbanist Giancarlo de Carlo and a new project on the Great Valley of the Appalachians. 

She is also author of the app Exploring Suzhou, which provides a cultural landscapes tour of the Chinese city of Suzhou. This app was used for many years to enrich the teaching in large-enrollment classes in Architecture and Urban Planning and Design at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. This app is also the seed of a digital project in process, the Guide to Suzhou Cultural Landscapes, supported by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH).

Her research has also been supported by fellowships and grants from The Institute for Advanced Study, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, the Humanities Institute at Boston University, the Huntington Library, and the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley.

She is also Associate Director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes at UVA.