Dr. Molly Briggs

Molly Briggs

Molly C. Briggs is a landscape historian, design theorist, visual artist, and trained printmaker who studies immersive rhetorics in printed matter in order to discern the mediated shape of built and social space. She teaches core courses in design methods, theory, and research for undergraduates in Graphic Design and graduate students in Design for Responsible Innovation. Professor Briggs holds a PhD in Landscape Architecture History and Theory from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MFA in Printmaking with a minor in Photography from the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University, and a BFA in Painting from the School of Art and Design at Illinois. Her dissertation, The Panoramic Mode: Immersive Media and the Large Parks Movement (2018), examines the commission, design, and reception of large urban park landscapes in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States in the context of a broader mediated culture of immersive spectacle.

Professor Briggs currently serves as President of the International Panorama Council (IPC, Switzerland) and as an Executive Editor of the Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies Yearbook (De Gruyter, Germany, in association with IPC). She is a 2023 Map Library Fellow of the MacLean Collection (Illinois) and is the recipient of numerous scholarly, creative, and pedagogical grants, awards, and recognitions. She has been represented by Zg Gallery in Chicago since 2004.

Research Interests

Immersive rhetorics in print media, nineteenth-century popular media, landscape representation, painting, spatial epistemologies, visual culture, the built environment, design history & theory, media history & theory

Special Course Offering

ARTD 499 Placemaking & Rural Tourism in China

Through collaborative research, planning, and design processes, students will develop coordinated architectural planning and designs, tourism development strategies, wayfinding plans, and memory-making activities tailored to the specific needs of residents and visitors of Xihu Village in the vibrant prefecture-level city of Jingdezhen, China. Grounded in community-engaged, human-centered design research processes, this hybrid studio-seminar course offers diverse, underrepresented, and global perspectives on community-engaged design processes in the global south to students at home and abroad.

This section meets semi-regularly with  ARCH 572 (Zhao) and RST 199/594 (Zou). Students in this ARTD section will develop wayfinding plans and memory-making plans that inform, and are informed by, architectural plans developed by students in the Architecture section and tourism marketing plans by students in the Recreation, Sport and Tourism section. We will design wayfinding plans that include coordinated systems of mapping and signage to help visitors navigate the site and interpret its significance. We will also design memory-making activities that build on wayfinding plans by introducing a variety of visitor experiences that enhance the sense of co-presence and engagement with the site’s cultural, historical, and phenomenological features.

Participating students will have the option to attend a nine-day field trip to Chabao, China, the site of our project, in February. Limited scholarships available from various sources. Travel is not required and students who do not travel will complete campus-based activities during the field trip. Learn more here.

Restrictions: Sophomore standing and permission of instructor. 3 Undergraduate hours / 4 Graduate hours.