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Melanie R. Ball is a PhD Candidate in architectural history at UT Austin School of Architecture, where she has taught as Assistant Instructor. Broadly, her teaching and research examine political, racial, and economic implications of housing’s centrality to visual representations of a “better future” in the twentieth century. Her architectural-urban history seminar course, Housing for Tomorrow: A History, investigates how housing has operated as a site and agent of experimentation, in service of political, economic, social, and religious ambitions from the mid-nineteenth to late-twentieth centuries across global geographies. Her dissertation, More Than Houses: Operation Breakthrough and the Evolution of Urban Crisis, traces a relationship between the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s industrial housing construction program, Operation Breakthrough (1969–1974), and the codification of “crisis” as a narrative. Centering visual media produced in conjunction with Breakthrough, the dissertation reveals how a technical mission for volume production of housing operated as a publicity campaign—a colorblind solution to “crisis” that affirmed the sustained interdependence of agendas for building housing with agendas for building nation.

For 2025–2026, Melanie is a Graduate Fellow in UT Austin’s Donald D. Harrington Society of Fellows. Her doctoral research has been supported by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape Studies Program, UC Berkeley Environmental Design Archives, and the Rockefeller Archive Center. She earned her MA in modern and contemporary art history with a specialization in design history from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was the Mohn Family Fellow. She held positions in Community Engagement and Visitor Experience at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA). A Los Angeles native, she holds a BA in the history of art and architecture from University of California, Santa Barbara.

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