Dr. Molly Briggs

Molly Briggs

Molly Briggs is a landscape and media historian, design theorist, visual artist, and professional printmaker who studies interactive and immersive rhetorics in printed matter in order to discern the mediated shape of built and social space. She combines traditional and makerly research methods to elucidate the workings and agency of landscape-focused representational documents. Her dissertation, The Panoramic Mode: Immersive Media and the Large Parks Movement (2018), positions the commission, design, and reception of large urban park landscapes in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States within a broader mediated culture of immersive spectacle. She co-founded the Panoramic & Immersive Media Studies Yearbook with Nicholas C. Lowe and Thorsten Logge in 2024 and is the author of Immersion in Print: Design, Sensory Reading and Spatial Imaginaries in Nineteenth-Century Chorography, forthcoming September 21, 2026.

Dr. Briggs teaches core courses and special electives on design tools, methods, theory, and research methodologies for undergraduates in Graphic Design and graduate students in Design for Responsible Innovation. She holds a PhD in Landscape Architecture History and Theory from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MFA in Printmaking and 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.

Dr. Briggs is President of the International Panorama Council (IPC—Switzerland) and an Executive Editor of the Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies Yearbook (De Gruyter—Germany). She is a 2023 Map Library Fellow of the MacLean Collection (Illinois) and 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

Interactive and immersive rhetorics in print media; nineteenth-century popular media; landscape representation; documentary heritage; spatial epistemologies; the built environment; visual culture; painting; printmaking; book design; typography; cartography; design history & theory; media history & theory; landscape history & theory

Special S25 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 the ARTD section will use visual communication and human-centered design research strategies 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.