Landscape Journal, the official journal of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA), is excited to welcome a new interim editor. Katherine Melcher succeeds previous interim editor Robert Corry and assistant editor David Pitt. The UW Press would like to thank Corry and Pitt for all their hard work on behalf of the journal over the past year. The following is a brief introduction to the new editor.
Katherine Melcher is an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s College of Environment and Design, where she teaches courses in community design, site engineering, and research methods. Her research interests span two areas: landscape architecture theory and social aspects of design, with a special focus on participatory design. Her work has been published in Landscape Journal, Landscape Review, Landscape Research Record, Town Planning Review, The Plan Journal, and New Geographies. Her piece in Landscape Research Record, “Three Moments in Aesthetic Discourse,” received the Outstanding Paper Award from the Council of Educators of Landscape Architecture in 2018.
She co-edited the book Community-Built: Art, Construction, Preservation, and Place, published by Routledge in 2017, and served as co-editor of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts’ newsletter from 2017 to 2019. In addition to teaching research methods at the University of Georgia, she has supervised the research of over twenty-five master students.
Prior to joining the University of Georgia, she was Design Director at Urban Ecology, a nonprofit based in the San Francisco Bay Area that specializes in community-based design. She developed participatory processes that engaged diverse communities in the design and creation of their public places, including the East Bay Greenway, a twelve-mile pedestrian and bicycle path in Alameda County, CA. The California Chapter of the American Planning Association awarded the East Bay Greenway Concept Plan its 2009 Focused Issue Award of Excellence.
Originally from Oklahoma, she received her BA in sociology from Vassar College and her MLA from Louisiana State University. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.
On her new role with Landscape Journal, Melcher says,
I am excited about the opportunity to engage directly with landscape scholars to help further our understanding of how we can best plan, design, and manage our environments. I would especially like to thank Robert Corry and David Pitt for taking so much time and care to introduce me to the editing process. Because of their work, I believe the transition will be smooth. I also would like to thank Dan Nadenicek and Ashley Steffens for encouraging me to take on this role.
To learn more about Melcher’s work, see her 2013 article in Landscape Journal entitled “Equity, Empowerment, or Participation: Prioritizing Goals in Community Design,” which is freely available to read until the end of January.