Barbara Burlison Mooney’s scholarship encompasses two fields: North American Architecture and African American Art and Architecture. She taught courses on European Architecture, Historic Preservation, and History and Methods.

Mooney’s research into race and architecture includes “Sunny Spain, or Our Algeria: The Other Colonial Revival” in Recreating the American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival (University of Virginia Press, 2006); “Looking for History’s Huts.” Winterthur Portfolio (2004); “The Comfortable, Tasty, Framed Cottage: The Emergence of an African-American Architectural Iconography” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2002); “Racial Boundaries in a Frontier Town: St. Louis on the Eve of the American Civil War” in Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City Since 1850 (Ashgate, 2001). She is currently completing an article about the evolution of Jim Crow imagery in nineteenth-century America and Europe.

Mooney’s next book project focuses on church architecture on the Midwestern prairie. Her research on this topic has been presented at conferences of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Vernacular Architecture Forum. One part of her investigation “Catholic Progressivism on the Prairie: George P. Stauduhar and St. Benedict’s Monastery” will appear in Building the Kingdom: Architecture for Religious Communities (Pickering and Chatto, in press).

Mooney earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was recognized by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa in 2007 with a Collegiate Teaching Award and has served as the Head of Art History in the past. She taught the following courses:

01H:009 Earthly Paradises: A Global History of Gardens
01H:084 Introduction to Western Architecture
01H:085 Introduction to American Architecture
01H:160 Building a Nation: American Architecture to 1865
01H:167 African American Art and Architecture
01H:177 Principles of Historic Preservation
01H:185 Modern Architecture, 1890-1970
01H:186 Contemporary Architecture, 1970-Present
01H:188 Big Shouldered City: Chicago Architecture
01H:189 Themes in Architectural History: Frank Lloyd Wright
01H:200 History and Methods of Art History
01H:385 Problems in Architectural History: Arts and Crafts Architecture and the Prairie School

Publications 

• Book chapter: “Catholic Progressivism on the Prairie: George P. Stauduhar and St. Benedict's Monastery.” In Modern Architecture and Religious Communities, 1850-1970, edited by A. Leptine & K. Jordan. London: Routledge (E-Book).
• Book chapter – “Bearing to Your Senese Sweet Sounds and Oders: Early Impressions of the Prairie Landscape.” In Sound and Scent in the Garden, edited D. F. Ruggles. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2017.
• Book Review: Review of The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island, edited by J. Conlin. SehePunkte: Review Journal for History 16, no. 9: (http://www.sehepunkte.de/2016/09/23130.html)
• Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and the Native Elite (University of Virginia Press, 2008)
• “Lincoln’s New Salem: Or, The Trigonometric Theorem of Vernacular Restoration,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture (2004)
• Vernacular America: Architectural Studies from Winterthur Portfolio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Winterthur Portfolio, in press).

Awards

• Career Development Award, University of Iowa