Barbara Miller Lane Receives Mellon Emeritus Fellowship

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Barbara Miller Lane, Emeritus Professor in the Humanities and McBride Professor of History of Art and Cities at Bryn Mawr College, has been awarded a Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship to work on "American tract houses of the 1950s and 1960s".

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Emeritus Fellowships provide research support for "outstanding" retired scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, together with generous subventions to the sponsoring institutions. In this second year of the Foundation's program, 14 fellowships were awarded to scholars at colleges and universities across the country.

Lane, a graduate of the University of Chicago and Barnard College, and a PhD in history from Harvard University, joined the Bryn Mawr faculty in 1962. The recipient of more than a dozen major grants and fellowships throughout her career, Lane has been a visiting professor at the Columbia University School of Architecture, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington DC, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, and a member of the "City Forum", an advisory group on planning Berlin after German unification.

She is the author of the classic work on German architecture and planning in the early twentieth century. The emphases of her other publications have ranged from the role of public buildings in shaping the cityscape, to the influence of nationalism on European architecture, to the evolution of modern housing types.

In 1971, Lane founded the Growth and Structure of Cities Program at Bryn Mawr. The Cities Program was the first undergraduate major in the country to combine city planning, art and architecture, history, political science, anthropology, economics, sociology and geology. Now in its 35th year, the program continues to be unique in its interdisciplinary, multicultural approach.

At the time of her retirement, Lane's students established a lecture series in her honor, as "a forum for innovative research on the relationship among history, culture, architecture and urban form."