Common Lecture

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Date of lecture: November 11, 2026

Bio

Kate Eggleston is a multidisciplinary artist and educator.  Her studio practice serves as a dialogue between her personal experiences and a broader exploration of themes such as motherhood, Jewish culture, and folk tales, working across paper, sculpture, and fiber.  She earned a BA in Visual Art and Art Teacher Certification from Ramapo College in 2005. She has attended artist residencies at Liquitex; the Elf School of the Arts; Guttenberg Arts; ChaNorth; Vermont Studio Center; _gaia studio; and Tyler School of Art.  Her recent public art projects include the Central New Jersey Barn Quilt Trail in Skillman, NJ, and a series of original quilts installed at the New Brunswick Train Station. She has exhibited throughout the tri-state area and across the United States, including at the Montclair Art Museum; Monmouth Museum; Artworks Trenton; Gallery Aferro; TerraCycle; SMUSH Gallery; Monmouth University; and the New Jersey State Museum.  Beyond her studio practice, she has over 20 years of experience teaching artists of all ages and skill levels across a variety of mediums. She currently works as a Project Manager at StoneDog Studios, a woman-owned set and prop studio. She lives in central New Jersey with her husband, daughter, and dogs.

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Date of lecture: October 14, 2026

Abstract

The Embankment is the massive stone section of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Harsimus Branch running parallel to 6th Street in Jersey City. The Embankment comprises six segments extending from Brunswick Street to Marin Boulevard on the east. This historic fabric, a remnant of the Industrial Revolution, is about to be adaptively repurposed as a linear park. Since its abandonment in 1999 there has been little or no access and a Novel Urban Forest has developed. Adapted to the dry rocky soils the existing vegetative assemblage is providing the foundation for the planning initiative. Rather than create a new planting plan, we chose to prioritize the mix of native and non-native species that have proven viable within the urban site.

A “light touch” is guiding the design of the Harsimus Branch from beginning to end. Design decisions, informed by Secretary of the Interior Standards, will preserve the historic integrity of the Embankment while concepts of 4th Nature target the improvement of ecosystem services. The ecosystem services have been characterized by a team from Rutgers University, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. The Embankment Preservation Coalition formed in 1998 as a working group that evolved from meetings of more than a hundred neighbors who were concerned about a proposal to demolish the Harsimus Branch Embankment and develop the site. After many legal battles the property has been transferred to the City of Jersey City and the Coalition’s design team has developed Conceptual Open Space Plans.

Bio

Sean A. Gallagher is a Principal and the Director of Sustainable Design at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, as well as adjunct faculty at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. His past work includes the United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum, the U.S. Massena Land Port of Entry, and Microsoft’s “The Square” project. Most recently, Sean led the biofiltration system design for CanalCafé, which received the prestigious Golden Lion Award for Best National Participation at the 2025 Venice Biennale. He also served as Design Director for the David Rubenstein Forum in Chicago, which was named the 2022 Best Tall Tower Worldwide by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH).

Frank Gallagher, Ph.D. For over forty years Frank has explored the connection between people and landscape through both land management and academic research. Serving as Chief of Interpretive Services, Administrator and Assistant Director of the New Jersey Division of Parks and Forestry, offered practical experience in an array of land management issues. After teaching courses in biology, evolution and environmental science for ten years at Upsala College, Frank joined the faculty at Rutgers The State University part time in 1994 and full time in 2012. With over 60 publications in both scientific journals and venues of general interests, Frank strongly believes in the value of written communication and has published topics ranging from phytostabilization of contaminated soils to the ethics of ecosystem function monetization.

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Date of lecture: October 7, 2026

Abstract

This talk traces recent hurricane relief and rebuilding efforts in the Caribbean to demonstrate how disaster recovery has become a highly contested and political terrain. I reflect on my ongoing work in the eastern Caribbean, and a growing regional body of critical disaster scholarship, to demonstrate how disaster recovery efforts intersect with issues around race, coloniality and land-based struggles. I situate regional discourses on climate change and climate justice within a broader politico-cultural context that foregrounds the current climate crisis as an extension of a colonial past that continues to shape the region’s subordinate position in an uneven world system. A situation that illustrates how the Caribbean’s disproportionate vulnerability to the adverse effects of a changing climate cannot be separated from the historical conditions and logics that brought about the contemporary world and Western modernity. I close by offering insights into island ‘survivalism’ within a context of growing global climate uncertainty and ongoing post/colonial struggles. In resituating mainstream discourses on the Anthropocene from the purview of the Caribbean, I hope to raise critical questions regarding the political, historical, and onto-epistemic assumptions/logics that undergird contemporary debates around the global climate crisis and its attendant solutions. I draw from decolonial scholarship and the Black Radical Tradition, to develop a basis for using catastrophe as a foundational starting point to theorize, resist and imagine radically new worlds and ways of being amidst the enduring conditions brought on by irreversible climate-linked losses.

Bio

Kevon Rhiney is an Associate Professor of Geography at Rutgers University and Director of the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow for the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at the University of the West Indies. Current research explores the intersection of climate change, development, and justice, focusing on how historically marginalized communities in the Caribbean and Central America navigate climate-linked socio-ecological shocks. Dr. Rhiney received his doctorate in geography at the University of the West Indies and pursued his postdoctoral studies at the University of Oxford under a British Commonwealth Fellowship. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) and currently serves as a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report.

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This lecture is in-person only.
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Date of lecture: September 9, 2026

The Rutgers Public Design Internship Program placed eleven students at workplaces around the country to contribute to public design projects and community engagement. The purpose of the internship is not simply to give students opportunities to practice design; the intention is to expand what they understand ‘design’ to mean through real public work and community engagement.

Placements ranged from American Samoa to Puerto Rico, Atlanta, Newark, New Brunswick, NYC, and Philadelphia. Students worked in a wide range of professional settings, including design offices, such as Marvel Designs and NYC Parks, Trust for Public Land offices, a large public park, and a municipal parks and recreation department. We will also hear about an LAF Case Study for a Queens nature reserve.

Across these varied settings, students encountered aspects of landscape architecture that extended well beyond producing drawings. Through working with communities, clients, public agencies, and design professionals, they developed a broader understanding of what design skills entail—and how design can be used to listen, engage, collaborate, and respond to complex public needs. More than just something that you make, design is something you do with people, places, and communities.

Students reflect on how their understanding of design and their own emerging professional identities changed through this work. The internships offered not simply an opportunity to practice drawing and design, but transformative learning experiences in which students discovered new ways of seeing, thinking, collaborating, and making a difference through landscape architecture.

Speakers

• Gene Sinnung, Karessa Falcon-Jiminez: Marvel International, Puerto Rico
• Logan Chin, Natalie Mufalli: Trust for Public Land, Atlanta
• Bella Hoy: Trust for Public Land, Philadelphia
• Phoebe Chou: Perez Planning + Design, virtual office
• Maddie Bideaux: Branch Brook Park, Newark
• Annaya Syed: NYC Parks, NYC
• Saanvi Bhattarai: Rutgers University Landscape Architect’s Office, New Brunswick
• Lola Wong: Parks and Recreation, American Samoa
• Brooke Belmonte: LAF Case Study, Queens, NYC

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Date of Lecture: September 23, 2026

DeBoer Travel Prize

The Roy DeBoer Prize winners will speak about their travels.

About the Prize
“Roy passionately believed that students should have an educational travel experience as undergraduates. For many years he led summer study-abroad courses for the department and saw the profound impact that travel has on the appreciation and study of landscape architecture. To encourage students to develop their own independent study-travel experiences, he founded and supported through his gifts a competitive Landscape Architecture Travel Prize that awards a stipend to help underwrite an educational trip.” Read more about Roy DeBoer.

Summer Praxis Studio in Puerto Rico

The study abroad design studio just concluded its 5-week travel program that combined experiential learning through research, discussion, documentation and design. Students from Landscape Architecture, Planning and Engineering, along with students form the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico and la Universidad Ana G Mendez experienced and engaged residents, professionals and a diversity of ecologies to understand climatic and resilient challenges to design.

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Date of Lecture: November 18, 2026

Abstract

Wolfram Hoefer’s new book Suburban Cultural Landscapes: Planning and Design for Place Identity investigates the concept of cultural landscape and its role for planning and design in the suburban context. The presentation will highlight how suburban settlement patterns in the U.S. and in Europe have been shaped by two very different suburban narratives: the American Dream narrative of individualistic suburban dwellers versus the European Rural Village narrative of the inherited cultural landscape. Suburban development in four metropolitan regions are analyzed and compared: Vienna/Austria, Budapest/Hungary, the Ruhr Region in Germany, and New Jersey’s Northeast Corridor. These regions have in common the fact that land use decisions are based on principles of property ownership in capitalist economic systems within a democratic framework. However, there are also differences: The American suburb forms a culturally distinct zone between city and open landscape. This suburban zone is smaller around Budapest and Vienna, where the countryside (conceived as an idealized cultural landscape) starts right at the urban edge. Similarities in settlement patterns between New Jersey and the Ruhr Region are shown to be related to industrial development. These different cultural narratives impact land use planning and design approaches on cultural landscapes within the suburban context.

Bio

Dr. Wolfram Hoefer is a Professor at the Rutgers Department of Landscape Architecture. He received is doctoral degree from the TU München and serves as Director of the Rutgers Center for Urban Environmental Sustainability (CUES). He developed numerous community outreach projects in the field of adaptive re-use of brownfields, urban resiliency, and infrastructure.

His current research explores underlying cultural narratives that shape planning and design approaches to cultural landscapes within the suburban context. He is lead editor (with Arianna Lindberg, Angela Oberg, Sebastian Schlecht, and Frank Gallagher) of the book: Climate Bridge. An international perspective on how to enact climate action at the government public interface. Rutgers University Press 2025. His theoretical research goes hand in hand with community outreach. Recent projects include Middlesex County Cultural Landscape and Ecosystems Service Plan, New Brunswick Parks Action Plan, and advising Drumthwacket Foundation on restoration and long-term management of Drumthwacket Estate, the official residence of the governor of New Jersey in Princeton.

Dr. Hoefer has lectured at national and international conferences and academic institutions. Among his honors are the 2021 Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture National Teaching Award and a 2018 NJASLA Merit Award, Landscape Planning from the New Jersey Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Web Page: Wolfram Hoefer – Rutgers Center for Urban Environmental Sustainability at Rutgers SEBS

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Date of Lecture: September 16, 2026

Abstract

Creativity thrives on curiosity, experimentation, and play. Discover how art, making, and playful thinking can spark fresh ideas, strengthen collaboration, and inspire new approaches to teaching, research, design, and everyday challenges. Together we will explore simple, accessible practices that can help cultivate a more creative life at work and beyond. 

Bio

Megan Lotts is an artist, educator, and visionary academic librarian whose work reimagines libraries as dynamic spaces for creativity, connection, and play. She is the author of The Playful Library: Building Environments for Learning and Creativity (2024) and Advancing a Culture of Creativity in Libraries: Programming and Engagement (2021). As Art Librarian and faculty at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Lotts brings an interdisciplinary approach to librarianship by blending scholarly research, art, and imagination to create inclusive and inspiring learning environments. She collaborates across the visual arts, humanities, landscape architecture, and other disciplines, supporting faculty and students through research instruction, creative programming, and innovative collection development. Widely recognized for her pioneering work advancing creativity and play in academic libraries, Lotts’s scholarship explores how maker culture, experiential learning, and hands-on exploration can transform information spaces into living laboratories for innovation. Through her teaching, research, and artistic practice, she invites people to engage with art in unexpected and participatory ways, reflecting her belief that libraries are not only repositories of knowledge but also catalysts for collaboration, experimentation, and joy. 

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Date of Lecture: September 30, 2026

Bio

Brian is nationally recognized as a leading thinker in the fields of urbanism, housing, and sustainability, and oversees the firm’s design direction and research initiatives. Brian was named a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 2011, lectures widely and has taught urban housing at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania for over a decade. Brian holds a B.S. in Environmental Design from the University of Oklahoma and an M.Arch from UPenn. ISA has leveraged the opportunities and challenges of its home city to drive a busy, innovative and thought-leading practice that takes on the complex context of the post-industrial American city. The firm’s work has been featured in ARCHITECT, Architectural Record, DWELL, Metropolis, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, and on NPR Radio. ISA has won over fifty local, regional, and national design citations, including five AIA National Housing Awards and was named 2020 Firm of the Year by AIA Pennsylvania.

Abstract

Meantime is a non-profit organization that began as an ISA initiative seeking to activate underutilized storefronts in service of urban communities. Working between the real estate industry, city government, land owners and neighborhood stakeholders, the organization’s mission is to activate spaces that facilitate connections, test ideas, reach new audiences and support local economies. Meantime explores multiple parallel paths of action including event curation, pop-up tenant occupations, partner collaborations and advocacy.

Meantime on Market is the largest and most visible project of this kind we’ve ever done — an entire block of storefronts on the 900 block of Market Street, in partnership with the City of Philadelphia and the Center City District, activating for three months this summer. It’s a tremendous opportunity to show what can be done in vacant spaces in the meantime, and to demonstrate the power of face-to-face, in-person interactions in city and community building.

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April 22, 2026

Join us this Wednesday for our last common lecture of the semester, where our landscape architecture student club will be presenting what they have done over the course of the Spring 26’ term!   We will also take a moment to recognize Professor Kate John-Alder and extend our heartfelt thanks for her years of dedication, as she prepares for her upcoming retirement. 

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April 15, 2026

Abstract

Teaneck Creek Conservancy (TCC) is a member-supported nonprofit that stewards over 45 acres of restored wetlands and floodplain forest in the Overpeck Park System in Bergen County, New Jersey. Science-driven management of the restored wetland is a priority for TCC. In this talk, I will share ways that Rutgers students have contributed research to support management at TCC. And in the process, students have gained experience collecting and analyzing data, as well as communicating science to a general audience. Student projects have included vegetation monitoring, tracking invasive species, and understanding patterns of iNaturalist usage by visitors. In addition to Rutgers projects, I will also highlight several of other programs in progress at TCC.

Bio

Allyson Salisbury, Ph.D. is an assistant teaching professor of urban forestry at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources. In addition to teaching, she studies how to help trees and other plants thrive in towns and cities. She is the recipient of the International Society of Arboriculture’s 2025 Early-Career Scientist Award. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, Allyson worked as a post-doc at The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, IL and Rutgers-Newark.