Architecture with an Historical Emphasis: Angela Person, Professor of Architecture
“Whether you’re working on a class project that lasts a week, or an audacious multi-year project like writing a book, big goals become much more manageable when you ask yourself what you can do today to move them forward, one small step at a time.”
Join us in welcoming Angela Person to CAPLA!
In addition to her role as Professor of Architecture at CAPLA, she is also the new Executive Director of Museums & Community Engagement in the University of Arizona’s Office of Research & Partnerships.
Person brings a unique and valuable perspective to CAPLA, with areas of expertise including architectural history and theory, museums and exhibition curation and cultural heritage and public memory.
Get to know Professor Person better, and learn about her fascinating research!
1. What drew you to architecture?
I came to architecture through curiosity. As an undergraduate, I was interested in everything from geology and engineering to journalism, anthropology and philosophy. Architecture and environmental design gave me a way to bring those interests together and think about how people experience places and how this affects us individually and collectively. That line of inquiry has stayed with me throughout my career.
2. What brought you to CAPLA? Where were you located and what were you doing before joining the college?
Before coming to Arizona, I was at the University of Oklahoma, where I served as Associate Dean for Research and External Engagement in the Gibbs College of Architecture. I had the opportunity to do work there that I cared deeply about, and much of it connected to research, teaching, exhibitions and public engagement. Arizona offered the chance to build on that work in a new setting, while joining CAPLA as a faculty member and taking on a university-wide role focused on supporting museums.
3. Tell us about your work as the Office of Research and Partnerships lead for Museums and Community Engagement! What will you be doing in that role and what excites you most about it?
The University of Arizona has an extraordinary network of museums and collections: from the largest collection of Southwest Indigenous pottery in the world, to an asteroid sample collected four billion miles away, to Ansel Adams’ photography archives to a museum-led program providing free swim lessons to help address generations of unequal access to swimming instruction, and much more.
My role is to work with museums across campus to support their goals in coordination with the university’s mission to educate, discover and serve.
I’m especially excited to raise awareness of these amazing collections and the experts who steward them. These resources are only found at the University of Arizona and are part of what makes the Wildcat experience so special.
4. What kinds of research have you done in your career? What inspired that work?
My research centers on how people experience and interpret places, and how those experiences inform memory, community and action. Collaboration runs through almost all of it. I’ve worked with historians, photographers, neuroscientists, geographers, meteorologists, political scientists, museum professionals, designers and students from different disciplines.
My early research at the Smithsonian focused on museums and cultural facilities. More recently, I’ve worked with an interdisciplinary team at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to study visitor experiences. I also supervised PhD candidate Felipe Flores, whose research with Achuar communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon engaged the material culture and recent transformation of the traditional jea house.
Architectural history and exhibitions are another major part of my work. For many years, I worked with colleagues to recover the history of the American School of Architecture at OU, an experimental teaching culture associated with Bruce Goff, Herb Greene and others. That work led to the development of archives, books and exhibitions including Renegades and Outré West. More recently, I co-curated Capital Brutalism at the National Building Museum, which used archival research, photography, models and speculative designs to explore the histories of and possibilities for culturally significant buildings that remain deeply polarizing.
5. What are you teaching this year, and what do you enjoy most about teaching?
In Spring 2027, I’ll teach ARC 471S/571S, Contemporary Architecture and Urban Theory. It’s an online course, and it will be a fun opportunity for students to explore current debates about architecture and urbanism.
What I enjoy most about teaching is seeing students become confident researchers. It’s amazing to see them ask creative questions, then develop their methods of inquiry and come to their own answers and perspectives. Some of my favorite experiences have come from mentoring undergraduate students and watching as their initial curiosities develop into serious, published research.
6. What advice do you have for students?
Dream big, and then take the next small step. When I was at the Smithsonian, my mentor taught me that you can have a huge idea and begin doing something about it that same day.
Whether you’re working on a class project that lasts a week, or an audacious multi-year project like writing a book, big goals become much more manageable when you ask yourself what you can do today to move them forward, one small step at a time.
