Academics

Dr. Melissa Rovner is an architectural historian and urban studies scholar whose research examines the built environment as a record of social power and site of contestation, with particular attention to urban development, housing, labor, and the politics of preservation. She holds a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture and a Graduate Certificate in Urban Humanities from UCLA, where her Digital Urban Humanities work was supported by a Mellon Foundation Teaching Innovation Grant. As the Digital Humanities Curatorial Fellow at the Chicago History Museum (2023-2024) She led digital projects to spatialize, narrativize, and recenter underrepresented collections items.

At Lake Forest College, Rovner teaches Public History, Museums and Exhibitions, Chicago Studies, and Architecture History.  In collaboration with the History Center of Lake Forest-Lake Bluff, Rovner and her Spring 2026 Museums course developed, curated, and launched Manufactured Stability: A History of Fort Sheridan. As a Faculty Fellow with the HUMAN grant, Rovner developed "Anti-Monumental Chicago," an open-source mapping site featuring student research on Chicago's controversial monuments and speculative correctives. She has also taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Chicago, and the Chicago Center for Urban Life and Culture, where she led the urban internship program and transformed their immersive pedagogical program.

Her forthcoming book, Divided by Design (University of Georgia Press), examines how race and labor were encoded in the uneven landscapes of Southern California. Rovner's latest research as a Postdoctoral Scholar at The University of Chicago combines GIS and computational methods to study how bias and value are constructed in historical preservation registries, identify stakeholder perspectives in planning commission meetings, and evaluate the effectiveness of community engagement in urban redevelopment. She is the co-founder of the Academic Consortium for Chicago Preservation, bringing together 27 scholars from 11 Chicagoland institutions, and developed the website Mapping Chicago Preservation as a scholarly, pedagogical, and public resource for sharing work on issues related to cultural heritage conservation.

Recent and forthcoming publications:

• "Reading Significance: Using AI to Study Historic Recognition," Urban Science (2026)
• "Who Speaks for the Neighborhood? Natural Language Processing of Redevelopment Debates in Chicago," Cities (2026)
• "The Uneven Geography of Historic Preservation: A Neighborhood Typology for Equity Planning in Chicago," Urban Studies (forthcoming)
• "Pacific Streamline: Architecture, Opportunism, and U.S. Imperial Culture from Los Angeles to Manila, 1935–1945," Architectural Histories (forthcoming)

Rovner is a Registered Architect in California and Illinois and a former practicing professional.