Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Ph.D.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Ph.D. (Columbia University) is a former Harvard professor, and writes about architecture, landscape, and cities and their effect on human health and wellbeing. Her book, Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (HarperCollins; also published in Chinese, Russian, and Korean) won a Nautilus Book Award in 2017 for its contribution to social and environmental justice, and Goldhagen was an opening-night Spotlight speaker at the AIA National Convention that same year.

A frequent keynote speaker, Goldhagen has won numerous awards and grants (including three from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts) for her criticism and writing on modern and contemporary architecture and landscapes, with an emphasis on their psychological and cognitive effects on people. She has published opinion pieces in The New York Times, served as Contributing Editor for Art in America and Architectural Record, and was The New Republic’s architecture critic for nearly a decade.

Goldhagen also has had a distinguished academic career with scholarly publications that include Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism (Yale University) and Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (co-edited with Réjean Legault, MIT Press) as well as numerous essays and reviews in premier architecture- and art-historical journals. Currently she writes essays, is finishing a memoir, works closely with the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), and consults with major companies on strategies for promoting and implementing human-centered design.