Morgan Newman

Morgan Newman is a Ph.D. candidate in Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. She is broadly interested in interrogating the role of architecture in repairing unjust and broken systems. Her doctoral research applies southern environmental histories, abolition ecologies, and architectural and spatial analysis to examine the relationship between race, space and environmental injustice in the United States South. Her research explores generative processes of repair in its many forms, including social/relational repair, ecological repair and material repair as an ongoing process that has deep roots in the Black Belt region and culture. Originally from Alabama, she mainly focuses her research on Black rural Southern communities but understands the relationship between race/racism, organized abandonment and environmental degradation that take various forms across the globe and are remnants of the same colonial afterlives.

She received her Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy and Sociology from Vanderbilt University in 2019 and her Master of Science in Public Policy and Management from Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon in 2022. She is a GEM University Fellow and a 2023-24 Steinbrenner Fellow. She was a Fulbright Scholar to Cyprus in 2020.

Research Interests

• Spatial justice 
• Decolonial studies 
• Environmental humanities