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Meral E. Williams, Ph.D.

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Looking forward to productive collaboration with "Harvard Alumni for Climate and the Environment"!

on October 28, 2025

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#climate #climateaction #Harvard

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A Conversation with Mary Otis Stevens in Cambridge

Photo. by me, 5.1.2019, Cambridge, Massachusetts On May 1 st , I had one of the most inspiring conversations since the beginning of my scholarly research and studies on women & gender (in postwar) architecture: While tracing “diverse and inclusive” perspective in architectural archives and collections, I came across with one of the pioneering women architects with her collaborative architectural design practice, publishing endeavor and surprisingly, her civic and political engagement. With her background in “philosophy”, “Mary” had decided to be “an architect” although some people around her did not support “that idea” at that time, and furthermore, she got into “the MIT-Architecture”. (Class of ’56). Responding to my e-mail, “she” (Mary Otis Stevens; 1928-present) kindly invited me to her home to talk about her career, architectural design practice, civic engagement, and publishing endeavor with Thomas McNulty, etc. As one of the leading women architects in...

A "Feminist" Conversation with Robert Geddes, the First Dean of the Princeton University, School of Architecture

When I was invited by Robert Hillier to visit his architectural design office and discuss design architect's creativity and (various types of) client's economic/commercial expectations from a creative architectural design project/building in Princeton in the beginning of 2009 (for my Ph.D. dissertation research at the Columbia University, GSAPP, PhD Program), I really had no idea this dialogue with him made me bring to Princeton again in 2015. After my first phone conversation with Robert Hillier, he had also suggested to contact Metin Celik, a Turkish-American architect in their NYC office in 2008. Following my conversation with Robert Hillier in 2008, Metin Celik had kindly accepted to meet me and talked about the importance of the client in architectural design practice, etc. In 2015, I contacted Metin Celik again during my advanced academic research project on "the historical recognition of Turkish and Turkish-American women architects of the postwar generat...

A Conversation with John Morris Dixon on Professional Architectural Journalism

With John Morris Dixon, Connecticut, 2007. Following my appointment with Robert Ivy and Suzanne Stephens at the editorial office of Architectural Record (McGraw Hill Company in NYC 2007), Suzanne Stephens kindly helped me to contact John Morris Dixon, a graduate of MIT-Architecture and former editor of Progressive Architecture. On May 8th 2007, I met him in Connecticut and we talked about his editorial experience at Progressive Architecture, Pencil Points, (professional) in the field of architectural journalism and the architecture profession in general. When I was an undergraduate architecture student, Progressive Architecture was one of the leading professional architectural journals at the the Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Architecture library. At that time, I could not have imagined a conversation with its editor! John Morris Dixon was very kind, came to the train station in Connecticut, invited me to have a lunch together and then, we continued our conversation ...

Conversation with Gary Van Zante, the Curator at the Architecture and Design Collections at the MIT Museum

I really thank Gary Van Zante for accepting my appointment request, participation in my systematic research project on diversity and inclusion in architecture archives and collections at schools of architecture in the U.S., sharing his valuable time to talk with. According to the e-mail by Myles Crowley, reference associate at the MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections (IASC) on February 6 th 2019, they do not have a designated archivist for architectural collection, and “most” of the architecture sources in the IASC are listed on the following web page: https://libraries. mit . edu/ archives /research/ collections/coll-architecture. html . In addition, the IASC was established in 1961 (100 years after the founding of MIT), but did not actively collect until the 1970s when professional staff were hired. Within this context, the profile and role of Gary Van Zante become highly important to shed light on documentation at the MIT-Architecture and its...

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