DOLORES HAYDEN

Dolores Hayden is professor emerita of architecture, urbanism, and American studies at Yale University. A renowned scholar of the history of the American urban landscape and the politics of place, her works have been translated into over a dozen languages.

She is the author of many award-winning books including Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (Pantheon, 2003), A Field Guide to Sprawl (with aerial photographs by Jim Wark, W.W. Norton, 2004), and Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life (W.W. Norton, 1984, rev. ed., 2002), titles that have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street, Journal, The Boston Globe, CNN and The Diane Rehm Show.

Earlier works include Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975 (MIT Press, 1976), a study of the building process in model towns, and The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (MIT Press, 1981), which introduced the activists she calls material feminists.

The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (The MIT Press, 1995), makes the case for landmarks that recognize the history of women and diverse ethnic groups in the labor force of Los Angeles. It documents her work as the founder of a non-profit arts and public humanities group based in that city.  

A former president of the Urban History Association, and a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians, Hayden is the recipient of the Radcliffe Graduate Medal for outstanding scholarship, an American Library Association Notable Book Award, two awards for Excellence in Design Research from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paul Davidoff Award for an outstanding book in urban planning, the Donald Award and the Oculus Award for feminist scholarship, and many other honors. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute, the NEH, the NEA, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. 

Hayden’s poetry has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies including Poetry, Raritan, Shenandoah, The Yale Review, Southwest Review, Slate, The Best American Poetry, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. She has received awards from the Poetry Society of America and the New England Poetry Club, and poetry residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Djerassi Resident Artist Foundation, and the Martha’s Vineyard Writers’ Residency. In 2008 she gave the Yale Phi Beta Kappa poem. Her three most recent collections are American Yard, Nymph, Dun, and Spinner (David Robert Books, 2004 and 2010) and Exuberance (Red Hen Press, 2019).

She is an alumna of Mount Holyoke College, Cambridge University, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a licensed architect. Before coming to Yale in 1991, Hayden was a faculty member at MIT, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. She is the widow of sociologist and novelist Peter H. Marris, and the mother of writer, poet, and translator Laura Hayden Marris.