I am an award-winning educator, designer, and historian. My passion for art, justice, and lifelong learning drives my teaching and research. It is a passion that stems from my personal identity and lived experiences. I am a non-binary intellectual, abolitionist, pacifist, artist, musician, long distance runner, and first-generation graduate of higher education. Over the past two decades, I have been developing an expertise in critical theories of place studies. This interdisciplinary model of counter-storytelling prompts us to situate the spaces of human liberation at the center of digital cultural heritage discourse. It draws on the intersections of Africana and indigenous studies, critical race theory, psychogeography, decolonial studies, and women’s and gender studies.  As an associate professor of the history and theory of the built environment with tenure at Ball State University, I employ this expertise to train the next generation of socially conscientious civic leaders, intellectuals, designers, and historians. Along these lines, my current research project Womanism, Positivism, and the Origins of Decolonial Feminism is a global study on the storied places and lived experiences of women who contested the positivist colonial/ modern gender system.

My peripatetic career path in academia and in the professions of architecture, landscape, urbanism, planning, and intellectual history began with a curiosity in the history of the modern built environment in relation rights and duties of citizenship. For these reasons I turn to a memory that situates me in my first two decades of lived experiences. The first time I witnessed a ‘historically significant’ structure was down on Highway 202 in the South Texas borderlands of Bee County, a highly conservative community that has faced persistent poverty and institutional neglect for decades. It was while at summer camp there at Naval Air Station Chase Field that I encountered it: a white low-slung asbestos-clad shoebox of a structure with ribbon windows. Years later during my education I learned that my peers, professionals affiliated to the nation's first federal preservation program begun in 1933 called the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), proclaimed that ‘Building 1009’ offers a ‘rare tangible link’ to our nation’s past. Among the other ‘historically significant’ structures situated on the 1,000-acre military industrial complex that was Chase Field, Building 1009 was less detrimentally impactful to me than the razor wire and chain link fences, the concrete barricades, the machine-gun wielding troops, and the fighter pilots who contaminated the air, water, and land that surrounded my childhood home. During my teens, the Cold War games and the jets that roared above my house grew silent. Chase Field turned to a maximum-security prison; and another correctional facility was built opposite of it, also less than 2 miles away from my childhood ‘home’. Sometimes I woke up to sirens and armed guards conducting searches for escaped inmates. Thus, beyond the modern community amenities and conveniences I lived, on the other side of the overpass, beyond the ‘city limits’, surrounded by LULUs. A nauseating wastewater treatment plant that did not serve us here. A right turn at that ‘food desert’ gas station there, before the bloody abattoir, the rusty used car lot, and the contaminated creek. Go past the gassy go-kart track. And drive beyond the asthma-inducing dairy farm peppered with pit mines. Turn right at the horse and goat farms. The formaldehyde-wielding taxidermist lived on my corner. A cesspool gurgled across the street from my house. That is, I grew up nearer to heavy industry and refinery junk yards, jukebox bars, trailer parks, airfields, prisons, and other Locally Unwanted Land Uses than I ever cared to. (Philip Alston’s ‘Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights’ makes a lot of sense to me, as such). I found an escape in performing experimental nujazz/blues music, gospel choir, and in Latinx and Queer culture. I ultimately invested in what I believed were the best opportunities for study that life could have offered me, following a life altering event on Highway 202.

I entered a career in environmental studies with an aim to co-create experiences of liberatory joy, if something better than what I grew up around. Before graduating with a bachelor’s degree in architecture at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) I worked with professor Dr Richard Tangum to prepare urban regeneration studies of the institutionally neglected communities of George West and Windcrest, Texas. I studied under the scholar of regional architecture Dr Vincent Canizaro and earned the ‘Senior Architecture’ award for a thesis project that offered strategies for transforming brownfield spaces along San Antonio’s Austin Highway into a network of experimental art installations. Then, with Dr Pliny Fisk III of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, I designed a modular kit-of-parts system for an urban wildlife education center proposal at Sheldon Lake in Houston, Texas. And in response to crises such as those created by Hurricane Katrina, we designed a GroHome project that appeared in Dwell Magazine. Thereafter I joined Dr Sue Ann Pemberton, UTSA students, and the Rarámuri Peoples of central Mexico in a design-build project. Deep in the state of Chihuahua, where the craggy, verdant Sierra Madre valley landscape unfolds into a mélange of lofty pine trees, dense cornfields, and adobe architecture, a museum stands. After months of studying the region, I spent a summer in Norogachi. Following the regenerative design strategies of Dr John Tilman Lyle, I offered my intellectual, emotional, and financial support for the design and construction of Centro Raramuri de Educacion y Investigacion. By this time, I was a designer for one of the most well-established firms in South-Central Texas, which specialized in ‘mestizo regionalism’, Kell Muñoz Architects. I became a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) accredited professional and worked with Henry Muñoz, Paul Sparks, Robert B Gonzales and others on award-winning architectural designs. Among them are the joyful serape sound wave façade design of the Edcouch-Elsa ISD Fine Arts Center. I helped design the winning competition entry for the San Antonio Convention Center Hotel, which was inspired by the famous Mexican artist Juan O'Gorman’s nearby mural entitled ‘Confluence of Civilizations’. I also worked on the refurbishment of the National Council of La Raza Headquarters in Washington, D.C., the design concept of which draws on representations of the Cuauhtli eagle, being the elemental force of rebirth, freedom and equality in the Aztec cosmology. And I collaborated on the designs of the first LEED-certified adaptive reuse project in San Antonio, among other cultural and educational projects published in Texas Architect Magazine.

With an aim to establish a career in higher education, I moved with two suitcases in tow to London, England, in 2006. I took a Master of Arts in Landscape Urbanism with distinction from the Architectural Association, School of Architecture. Among the oldest, most critical, independent, competitive, and prestigious learned institutes of the built environment, I developed under Eva Castro, Eduardo Rico, Lawrence Barth, and Sandra Morris a thesis on the art, food culture, and urbanism of the United Arab Emirates and Oman. During this time, I took a certificate in parametric structures led by Marco Poletto and Claudia Pasquero at the Istanbul Technical University and collaborated with my peers to take first prize in the AA-ITU Istanbul Capitol of Culture Pavilion competition, the design of which appeared in and on the cover of From Control to Design: Parametric/ Algorithmic Architecture (2012). My thesis creations and collaborations, which built on Félix Guattari’s Three Ecologies (1989), appeared in installations that travelled across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia as well as in edited volumes, in popular magazines, and on CNN. Parts of my thesis, which drew on such context-appropriate technologies of fogwater harvesting, seawater greenhouses, and vertical farming, also appeared in the Journal of Urban Regional Research, the Journal of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats, and other outlets. Then I worked with Hargreaves Associates on transforming a Victorian-era toxic dumping ground into Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. With my experience of designing  LEED-rated cultural and educational projects, I launched a bespoke consulting practice and collaborated with Max Fordham Engineering and others on the architectural design of competition-winning entries for sustainable school prototypes in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. After working on the design of various BREEAM-rated academies across South England, I became a British Schools for the Future Program facilitator. I led faculty, students, staff, and the community in various planning workshops and produced public reports and brochures that relayed their needs and desires to design firms.

My research interests during this time turned more fully to exploring scholarship on the so-called ‘pioneers’ of modern town planning, city design, and civic sociology: Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford. My PhD dissertation, under the prolific historian of political thought Dr Gregory Claeys explored how their works were informed by strands of republican and anti-imperialist political thought of the ‘French School’ of regionalism. The faculty of the history department at Royal Holloway, University of London, awarded me the Crossland Scholarship for international academic excellence in 2010. After I successfully defended my dissertation ‘Republican Spaces: an Intellectual History of Positivist Urban Sociology in Britain, 1855–1920', the international board of scholars at Maison Auguste Comte in Paris awarded me its annual 'Prix de thèse' for the top dissertation on [the curiosities of] positivism and its philosophical currents. The archival work I did while a PhD student set the foundations for my scholarship as a historian of ideas and educator.

I joined Ball State University in 2014 and began teaching courses in social and environmental justice and the global history and theory of the built environment under Dr Mahesh Daas, Professor Andrea Swartz, and Dr Olon Dotson. I  engaged in the envisioning and implementing of course designs, syllabi, lesson plans, workshops, and field trips to Toronto, Montreal, and across the United States. I have served as a member of university governance committees, undergraduate and graduate curricular teams, as consultant for student-led publications, and as a safe spaces and first-generation pathways mentor. I have helped design students get into graduate schools and internships across the United States and England.  In other forms of service, I am an advocate for non-tenured faculty in the University Senate and I am one of the Ball State's Inclusive Excellence Champions. Alongside contributing to the conceptualization, co-creation, and management of complex publications, participatory design projects, and installations, I have shared aspects of my evolving teaching and research agenda at academic conferences and learned institutes across the world.

I was invited in 2015 to teach at the University for the Creative Arts at Canterbury, England. Working with program leaders Rob Nice and Gabor Stark, I served as thesis research coordinator and Subject Area Leader in History and Theory of Architecture. I entered a tenure-stream position at Ball State the following year. My departmental home is the College of Architecture and Planning, but I have also taught in the Honor's College and in the Women's, Gender, and African American Studies Program. I facilitated a multidisciplinary design justice studio and seminar in collaboration with Dr John Anderson, Ball State design students and community stakeholders in 2020. Drawing on scholarship at the intersections of contemplative inquiry, moral and reparatory history, critical race theory, and decolonial studies, we guided students to create a network of memorials, activist spaces, ArcGIS counterstory maps, and zines called 'Debris'. They honor the lives of community leaders and activists who devoted their lives to contesting dominant narratives that undergird structural oppression.

Among my other works in this regard are two full-length books on social activists who engaged with the British colonial/ modern gender system. My first book Moralising Space: the Utopian Urbanism of the British Positivists (2018) recovered the stories of a band of political thinkers whose acute critiques of Western capitalism, imperialism, church, crown, and the built environment informed the efforts of the international Garden Cities, civics, and town planning movements, the Anti-Aggression League, the Sociological Society, and the League of Nations. Reviewers called the book a ‘milestone’ for revealing the interdisciplinary global impact of Positivism through the conduit of the British Empire. In 2019, I took a research residency at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris, France. With many thanks to Dominique Iogna-Prat, Michel Bordeau, and David Labreure I delivered a lecture series outlining aspects of my second book Richard Congreve, Positivist Politics, the Victorian Press, and the British Empire (2021). It explores the troublesome life story of the titular Victorian critic, a former Oxford don and Anglican preacher who inspired generations of philosophers and activists by way of founding a global anti-imperialist ‘Church of Humanity’ to contest the rise of the British Empire. Among these thinkers were George Eliot, Beatrice Webb, Annie Besant, and Sybella Gurney. Based on this work, the widely esteemed intellectual biographer Mary Pickering recommended to the historians of women philosophers Lydia Moland and Alison Stone that I publish excerpts from my current research project in their Oxford Handbook of American and British Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers (2022). Strands of this project of mine on womanism, positivism, and the origins of decolonial feminism also appear in the piece ‘A "true organ of Humanity": on the Anti-feminist Architectural Regionalism of Comtean Positivism in Victorian Britain' in Region — Critiques: Critical Studies in Architectural Humanities Series (2023).

Along these lines in 2022 I earned a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute certificate for work that I did with the brilliant and gracious Dr Andrea Roberts, Dr Thaïsa Way, and others to create open access teaching modules for ‘Towards a People's History of Landscape: Black and Indigenous Histories’. During the previous year I  joined a Ball State decolonial studies community of practice led by Dr Kristen McCauliff, where I focused on integrating critical museum studies into my course discussions. Among other opportunities the 'Reimagining Blackness and Architecture' certificate course I took in 2020, offered by Dr Arlene Hernandez and Dr Sean Anderson at the Museum of Modern Art, has also informed my work. My scholarship of teaching and learning on these topics has appeared in the book I co-edited with Sean Burns called Understanding Site in Design Pedagogy (2022). And it will also appear in a piece I co-wrote with Dr John Anderson called ‘Memorialising Black life and death: contemplative inquiry in interdisciplinary studies' for Dr Itohan Osayimwese and Dr Felipe Hernandez’s forthcoming book Routledge Critical Companion to Race and Architecture (2025).

I am thrilled to announce that I have been selected to participate in the Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad in Tanzania with the School for International Training (SIT), ‘Tuko Pamoja: Tanzanian Creativity and Perspectives in an Era of Climate Change’, supported by a grant from the Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad (GPA), U.S. Department of Education. The program focuses on a decolonizing approach to teaching and learning and is scheduled to run June 28-August 1, 2025. I was among the six highly qualified college educators to participate in this Fulbright-Hays project. This workshop will offer educators such as myself methods for infusing African perspectives into higher education curricula when discussing climate change. For the Tanzania-Zanzibar region is considered a microcosm of the African continent. This highly prestigious Fulbright-Hays Project will enable me to explore the creative and innovative ways that urban and rural communities are responding to the environmental challenges we face.

My career is dedicated to improving our built environment by developing, exploring, and communicating the counterstories of critical theories of place studies. For my original contributions to historical knowledge, I was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2023.

Matthew Wilson, PhD FRHistS