Molly Lester

Margaret (Molly) Lester is the Associate Director of the Urban Heritage Project, based in the Weitzman School of Design's Department of Historic Preservation. In that role, she is the project manager for cultural landscape research, survey/documentation, and community engagement projects conducted with the National Park Service and other partners. She has also been a lecturer with the Department of Historic Preservation, co-teaching the core studio course for second-year graduate students.

 

In addition to her role with the Urban Heritage Project, Molly is a 2024 Cokie Roberts Women's History Fellow, based on her research on the "She-She-She" camps of the New Deal. Since 2011, she has also been researching the life and legacy of architect Minerva Parker Nichols (1862-1949). As part of that work, she was a guest curator for the exhibit "Minerva Parker Nichols: The Search for a Forgotten Architect," produced by the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania and funded by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, and she was a 2019/2020 Fellow for the James Marston Fitch Foundation.

 

Molly is the author of Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City (Temple University Press, 2024), which grew out of her work as a 2020 grantee of the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, and the co-author of the exhibit book Minerva Parker Nichols: The Search for a Forgotten Architect (distributed by Yale University Press, 2024)

 

Molly previously worked as a Research Associate for PennPraxis, managing heritage-centric research and community design projects. She has also worked as a national program director for Partners for Sacred Places and as an architectural historian and historic tax credit consultant for Heritage Consulting Group, advising on the rehabilitation of historic properties around the country.

 

Molly is the founder of the InKind Baking Project and a former co-chair of the Young Friends of the Preservation Alliance. She holds a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Architectural History from the University of Virginia.