Eric P. Mumford, PhD, MArch

Eric P. Mumford, PhD, MArch

Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Professor Eric Mumford is an architect and an academic historian of architects’ efforts to shape cities since the mid-nineteenth century. He is especially interested in efforts to design urban environments since the advent of new transportation and other technologies around the mid-19th century, which also coincided with some of the first public health legislation to regulate urban environments. Many of the urban directions advocated at that time were in part efforts to address public health issues, which continue to shape urban environments today. Unfortunately, those efforts were also strongly influenced by then-mainstream ideas about European racial superiority, which led to extensive official and quasi-official efforts to segregate cities along high inequitable racial lines. His research seeks to interpret the history of the design of cities with reference to all of these ideas, which have resulted in the complex outcomes that now characterize contemporary urban environments.