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About Me

I am an architecture and landscape historian with a strong commitment to community-engaged, place-based historic preservation. Creating connections between the university, faculty, and students in the pursuit of projects that promote a fuller, more equitable narrative of American history is central to my work. As a scholar and teacher, I draw on my interdisciplinary training in architecture, art history, environmental studies, and museum work to bridge the specialized internal questions of the design disciplines with public narratives. I am driven by a core interest in authorship and storytelling, and the ways that buildings and landscapes intertwine stories of labor, technology, capital, gender, and race to shape the world around us. I joined the faculty at Illinois of Fall 2023 and am completing the book Telephone City: Architecture and the Rise and Fall of the Bell Monopoly, supported by a Mellon Fellowship in Urban Landscape Studies from Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC (2022-23).

Recent Publications

Books

2019    The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture, edited with an introduction by Kathryn Holliday, foreword by Robert Decherd, afterword by Stephen Fox. Austin: University of Texas Press.

2012    Ralph Walker: Architect of the Century. New York: Rizzoli.

2008    Leopold Eidlitz: Architecture and Idealism in the Gilded Age. New York: W. W. Norton.

Book chapters

2020    “Making the Woods for the Little Chapel: The Native Landscape Movement and Modern Architecture in Texas,” in Wilfried Wang, ed., O’Neil Ford Monograph Series No. 8: The Little Chapel in the Woods. Tübingen, Germany: Wasmuth, forthcoming October 2020.

2020    “To Be Modern in Texas: Lone Star Avant-Garde,” for Making Houston Modern: The Architecture and Life of Howard Barnstone, Barrie Scardino Bradley, Stephen Fox, Michelangelo Sabatino, editors, University of Texas Press.

Articles and Essays

2020    “Building the Network: Telephone Buildings in the United States,” and five building entries for the Society of Architectural Historians online Archipedia,

2019    Kathryn Holliday and Colleen Casey, “Urban Sprawl, Social Media and the Town Hall Square as a Symbol for Civic Culture,” Moderne Stadtgeschichte 1 (2019): 89-103.

2019    “Designing Democracy in Dallas-Fort Worth,” Columns Magazine 37, n2 (Fall 2019): 21-25.

2017    “Walking in Zaha’s Shoes,” Columns Magazine 34, n4 (Fall 2017): 68.

2017    “The Road to Disinvestment: How Highways Divided and Destroyed Community Connections in Dallas,” Columns Magazine, 34, n. 1 (Spring 2017): 28-33.

2015    “The Fort Worth Stockyards deserves local protection,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, oped written with Dr. Jacqueline Lambiase, 17 December 2015.

Media Coverage

Social Media

@kehcalling

Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, Modern, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Art & Architectural History, Urban History