Profile
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS
- Lecturer and Studio Coordinator, Program in Architecture, College of Arts & Sciences & Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
- Visiting Assistant Professor, Program in Architecture, College of Arts & Sciences & Stuart Weitzman School of Design, Pratt Institute
BIO
Miranda Mote, PhD is a historian, artist, and educator based in Philadelphia. Mote graduated with a BArch from University of Cincinnati (1995), MDes in History and Philosophy of Design from Graduate School of Design, Harvard University (2015), and PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania (2021). She currently teaches at Pratt Institute and in the undergraduate program in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. As an artist, Mote has developed nature printing techniques based on her historical research about the poetics of botanical image making. Her work with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities in 2021 supported the development of an arts-focused literacy and botany curriculum designed literacy of nature and plants in urban environments and the establishment of Botanography as a non-profit to directly serve students and families in Philadelphia County with literacy and STEAM programming based in school gardens. Mote was recently awarded the Garden Club of America / Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture and will work and reside at the American Academy in Rome 2023-24.
PH.D. DISSERTATION
Reading and Writing a Garden, Materials of a Garden Made in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1683–1719)
RECENT ARTICLES
- “Im Gemeinstry Garten: Evidence of a Common Healing Garden in Seventeenth-Century Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Fall 2021. (peer reviewed)
- “Words are World-makers,” Book Review: The Francis Daniel Pastorius Reader, Edited by Patrick M. Erben et al. (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2019.
- Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, forthcoming. (peer reviewed)
- “The Art of Gardening in a Pennsylvania Woods, Francis D. Pastorius’ garden in Germantown, Pennsylvania (ca. 1683–1719),” Expedition Magazine, official members’ magazine for the Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Fall 2020 special issue. (peer reviewed)
- “Exquisite Odor, the Colosseum, a garden of serendipitous procreation,”Studies in the Histories of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, An International Quarterly, 35:2, 124-143, DOI: 10.1080/14601176.2014.979582, Spring 2015.
