Dolores Hayden, Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies Emerita at Yale University, writes about built environments and the politics of place. For over four decades, she has pioneered the study of vernacular buildings and urban landscapes to explore questions about gender, class, and race.
Her award-winning books on the contested history of cities and suburbs include Seven American Utopias (MIT Press, 1976); The Grand Domestic Revolution (MIT Press, 1981); Redesigning the American Dream (W.W. Norton, 1984, rev. ed. 2002); Building Suburbia (Pantheon, 2003); and A Field Guide to Sprawl (W.W. Norton, 2004).
In Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, Hayden founded and directed The Power of Place, a non-profit that developed a downtown itinerary of urban livelihoods to promote preservation and public art recognizing the history of women and people of color. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (MIT Press, 1995) captures that work.
Hayden is a former president of the Urban History Association and a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians. She attended Mount Holyoke College, Cambridge University, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and taught at MIT, UCLA, and UC Berkeley before Yale. Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Radcliffe Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford have supported her research.
She is also a poet. Her most recent book of poems, Exuberance (Red Hen Press, 2019), explores risk and excitement in the voices of female and male stunt pilots from the early years of American aviation.
