The University of Southern California School of Architecture has announced the appointment of associate professor Alison Hirsch as the new director of the Master of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program, effective August 2019.

Hirsch received her Master's of Landscape Architecture, Master's of Historic Preservation and Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. As a landscape theorist, designer and historian, Hirsch's research areas include: cultural landscapes; spatial politics of landscape architecture; contested urban landscapes; activist design methods; practices of representation; and landscape's intersections with performance and choreography.

In addition to serving on the USC Architecture faculty since 2013, Hirsch is also the co-founder of Foreground Design Agency and a writer. She is the co-editor of a book of essays by James Corner, titled The Landscape Imagination, and is currently working on a book titled The Performative Landscape.

Hirsch previously taught landscape architecture theory and design at Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD), the University of Virginia and the University of Toronto. She also was a 2017-2018 Prince Charitable Trusts / Rolland Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

To read the full press release from USC, click HERE.