Honoring a Colleague: Working with an Unfinished MS

The Department of Historic Preservation, in collaboration with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, present a discussion with Dell Upton and Elizabeth Milroy about completing late Aaron Wunsch's book manuscript  "Cemetery City".

Dell Upton is Distinguished Research Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Art History at UCLA and Professor Emeritus in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. He has also taught at the University of Virginia and at Stanford University. His books include Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (Yale University Press, 1986), Architecture in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1998), Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (Yale University Press, 2008), American Architecture: A Thematic History (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Landscapes in the Making (edited with Stephen Daniels, 2025).

In recent years, his interests have turned to political monuments since antiquity. What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift and Monument Building in the New South (Yale University Press, 2015) is a study of civil rights and other memorials of recent decades. In addition to working with Elizabeth Milroy on Aaron Wunsch’s book, Dell is in the late stages of a study of the U.S.S. Constitution (“Old Ironsides”) in the Jacksonian era, centering around its figurehead of Andrew Jackson.

Elizabeth Milroy is Professor Emerita of Art & Art History at Drexel University and Professor Emerita of Art History at Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on the history and representation of cultural spaces. She has published and lectured on such artists as Thomas Eakins, Emma Stebbins and the “Eight,” on the history of art museums and exhibitions, and on the history of public parks. She is author of The Grid and the River: Philadelphia's Green Spaces, 1682-1876 (Penn State University Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2017 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize by the Foundation for Landscape Studies for significant contribution to the study and understanding of garden history and landscape studies. She also coedited the anthology Reading American Art (Yale University Press, 1998), a standard textbook in the field. Recent publications include entries in David Brigham, ed. Two Hundred Years: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania 1824-2024 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).

Currently Dr. Milroy is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Historic Preservation in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. She serves on the editorial boards of Change Over Time and the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. She is Secretary of the Board of Councilors of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and is a member of the Committee on Historic Designation with the City of Philadelphia’s Historical Commission.

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