Melissa Rovner is a Registered Architect and Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture History. Her research focuses on the role of labor, housing, neighborhood development, and racial and gender perception in the historical production of spatial inequalities. Rovner uses interdisciplinary methods of the Urban Humanities such as thick mapping and spatial ethnography to excavate and expose the hidden layers of the city and its people that have been marginalized, displaced or erased in the physical environment, as in what the public experiences and imagines of those environments.

 

Her work on the history of social surveys and property valuation has been published in the Journal of Planning History, and her development of digital humanities pedagogy has been recognized with a Mellon Teaching Innovation Grant. She is currently working on a digital mapping project on the city of Chicago that leverages the collections of the Chicago History Museum, where she is appointed as a Digital Humanities Curatorial Fellow. Rovner has taught Art, Architecture, and Urban History and Critical Studies at Woodbury University, the University of San Diego, and the University of California, Los Angeles.