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Melanie R. Ball is an architectural historian who examines the political economy of urban housing in the twentieth century United States. She completed her PhD in architectural history at UT Austin School of Architecture in June 2026. Her current book project, More Than Houses: Operation Breakthrough and the Industrialization 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 racial liberal narratives of housing and urban “crisis.” Centering visual media produced in conjunction with Breakthrough, More Than Houses 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 2026–2027, Melanie is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. At Emory, her research and teaching continue to address racial liberal attitudes toward factory-built housing as a solution to “crisis” of urban living in the late-twentieth century, calling into question the raced and classed dimensions of what defines living spaces as suitable, livable, or fair. Her architectural-urban history seminar course, Housing for Tomorrow: A History, will investigate how housing 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.

Melanie previously taught at UT Austin. Her writing has been published on PLATFORM. Her research has been supported by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape Studies Program, UC Berkeley Environmental Design Archives, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Donald D. Harrington Society of Fellows (UT Austin). Melanie 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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