High Meadows Environmental Institute / Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism & the Environment

Davy Knittle’s fellowship is sponsored by the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Effron Center for the Study of America, and the Mellon Foundation. Knittle's fellowship spans the Spring and Fall 2022 semesters.

Knittle’s research considers how normative ideas of race, sexuality, and gender have shaped the redevelopment of the built and non-built environments of U.S. cities from the 1950s to the present. His current book project, Designs on the Future: Gender, Race, and Environment in the Transitional City, uses a multidisciplinary archive of literary and cultural texts to trace resistance to dominant narratives of urban progress. Designs on the Future engages a queer and trans method of reading urban and environmental change that identifies the entanglement of urban, environmental, and queer and trans experiences of loss in U.S. cities in the wake of urban renewal.

Knittle (he/they) completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught courses at the intersection of queer and trans studies, critical race studies, environmental humanities, urban studies, and U.S. literature and culture. From 2016-2021, Knittle curated the City Planning Poetics talk and reading series at the Kelly Writers House at Penn.

In Spring 2022, Knittle taught the course “Race, Gender, and the Urban Environment,” which considered how normative and resistant ideas of race and gender have conditioned proposals both for the future of cities and for the future of the planet. He was also a co-curator of the Spring 2022 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment series, “Reframing Repair.”