About Dr. Briggs
Molly Briggs
Molly Catherine Briggs is a design theorist, landscape historian, and studio practitioner who studies immersive rhetorics in printed matter in order to distill the mediated shape of built and social space. She teaches design theory and methods and coordinates the MFA concentration in Design for Responsible Innovation. Professor Briggs holds a PhD in Landscape Architecture History & Theory from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MFA in Art Theory & Practice from Northwestern University, and a BFA in Painting from the School of Art & Design at Illinois. Her dissertation, The Panoramic Mode: Immersive Media and the Large Parks Movement (2018), examines the affiliation of large urban park landscapes in Europe and the United States with nineteenth-century virtual reality media.
Professor Briggs is the recipient of numerous scholarly, creative, and pedagogical grants, awards, and recognitions. She currently serves as Co-President of the International Panorama Council (Switzerland) and is a member of the College Art Association, the Design Research Society, the SECAC, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Magic Lantern Society (UK). 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