Sonja Dümpelmann

Sonja Dümpelmann joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design in July 2019.

Dümpelmann’s research and writing sit squarely within the environmental and urban humanities and focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban environments in the Western world. Of special importance to her work are the relationships between the inside and the outside, i.e. the relationships between architecture and landscape, center and periphery, theory and practice; those in power and those subjected to that power; intent and contingency; and the relationships between social and political processes and landscape transformation.

Dümpelmann is the author of Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin (Yale University Press, 2019; 2022 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award, 2019 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize), Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design (University of Virginia Press, 2014; 2015 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Book Prize), and of a book on the Italian landscape architect Maria Teresa Parpagliolo Shephard (VDG Weimar, 2004). Her edited volumes include Landscapes for Sport: Histories of Physical Exercise, Sport, and Health (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2022), Airport Landscape: Urban Ecologies in the Aerial Age (together with Charles Waldheim; Harvard GSD, 2016), Women, Modernity, and Landscape Architecture (together with John Beardsley; Routledge, 2015), A Cultural History of Gardens in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2013), Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century (together with Dorothee Brantz; University of Virginia Press, 2011), and Pückler and America (German Historical Institute Washington DC, 2007). Dümpelmann has guest-edited special journal issues and has published numerous book chapters, and articles in scholarly and professional journals, including Journal of Urban History, Landscape Journal, Landscape Research, Planning Perspectives, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, Stadtbauwelt, Stadt und Grün, Die Gartenkunst, Journal of Landscape Architecture, and Landscript.

She lectures internationally and has held research fellowships at the German Historical Institute, and at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC. In 2020-21 she was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). Her work has also been supported through grants from the Graham Foundation and the Foundation for Landscape Studies. She was a 2015 August-Wilhelm Scheer Visiting Professor at the Technical University Munich.

Dümpelmann has served as Senior Fellow of Garden and Landscape Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (2014-20), Washington D.C., and is the past President of the Landscape History Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (2013-16).

Before joining the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania she held associate and assistant professorships at Harvard University, the University of Maryland, and Auburn University. Dümpelmann holds a doctorate in landscape history from the University of the Arts, Berlin, and a MLA from Leibniz Universität Hannover. She has curated exhibitions on landscape-related topics in Germany and the U.S., and has worked as a landscape designer in Studio Paolo Bürgi, Switzerland.