Anne Beamish, Ph.D.
Professor, Graduate Coordinator Landscape Architecture and Regional & Community Planning Director, Ph.D. Program
College of Architecture, Planning and Design
2099 Seaton Hall| 920C N. Martin King Jr. Drive, Manhattan, KS 66506
My research and teaching interests focus on how public space is invented or re-imagined and the innovative ideas, technologies, and policies that have transformed the urban landscape — in particular streets, sidewalks, and parks. Within this realm I investigate different but overlapping aspects such as night and lighting, public art, memory and commemoration, trees and the concept of nature, and spatial history. Most of my current work examines these subjects from a historical perspective.
Current research projects include: the history of nighttime and public street lighting; the evolution of the Boston Common from a utilitarian space to treasured park; American pleasure gardens, moving sidewalks, “comfort stations," and the cultural life of trees.
Before coming to KSU, I taught in the planning program in the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin; the College of Design at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston; and the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT.
My educational background is in urban planning and architecture. I received a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as an M.S. in Architecture Studies and Master in City Planning from MIT. My undergraduate B.Architecture degree was from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
Recent publications include:
"A Much-Abused Tree: The Rise and Fall of the Lombardy Poplar” in Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes (2022); “Before Parks: Public Landscapes in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Boston, New York, and Philadelphia” in Landscape Journal (2021); “Rational Entertainment and Instructive Amusement: Philadelphia’s Nineteenth-Century Urban Pleasure Gardens” in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes (2020); “A Garden in the Street: The Introduction of Street Trees in New York and Boston” in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes (2017); “Venerable Relic: The Great Elm on Boston Common” in Arboricultural Journal. (2017); "Rendering the Darkness Visible" in Cities of Light: Two Centuries of Urban Illumination, Routledge (2015); "Enjoyment in the Night: Discovering Leisure in Philadelphia's Eighteenth Century Rural Pleasure Gardens" in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes (2015); "Introduction: Connectivity and Landscape Change" In Connectivity and Landscape Change (2013); "Contributors and Lurkers: Obstacles to Content Creation" in Collaborative Information Behavior: User Engagement and Communication Sharing(2010); Technological Imagination and the Historic City: Florence (2009); and Learning from Work: Designing Organizations for Learning and Communication published by Stanford University Press (2008).