Building Antebellum New Orleans - a conversation with Tara Dudley

Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence

Author Reading and Conversation with Dr. Tara A. Dudley

Join author Tara A. Dudley for a reading and conversation of her award-winning book, Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence, a deeply researched examination of the free 19th-century Black craftsmen and real estate developers who transformed the cultural and architectural legacy of New Orleans. Highlighting excerpts from the book, Dr. Dudley will discuss her motivations, process, and methodologies to tell a story of the architectural activities and influence of gens de couleur libres—free people of color—and how they expressed group identity through property ownership and built culture in New Orleans.

Bio:
Dr. Tara A. Dudley is an Assistant Professor in The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, where she teaches architectural history and interior design history courses. In her research and scholarship, she engages untold histories and works to demystify the process, paths, and methods of marginalized contributors to the built environment and reassert their historic agency with an emphasis o African American builders and architects in the US South. Her work reflects an interdisciplinary approach to the study of cultural resources with a focus on nineteenth-century American design, African American architectural history, historic preservation, and material culture. She is the author of Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence (University of Texas Press, 2021), winner of the Association of American Publishers 2022 Prose Award in Architecture & Urban Planning, 2022 Summerlee Book Prize in Nonfiction from the Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast), 2022 Best Book Prize Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH), and the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning 2022 On the Brinck Award.

Now available from The University of Texas Press
Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence
Winner:
* 2022 American Association of Publishers Prose Award in Architecture and Urban Planning
* 2022 Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast at Lamar University Summerlee Book Prize - Non-Fiction
*2022 Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) Best Book Prize