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Charlette Caldwell

Charlette Caldwell is a Doctoral Candidate and Provost Diversity Fellow studying the history and theory of architecture at Columbia GSAPP. Her research focuses broadly on nineteenth-century American architecture through a vernacular architectural perspective. Charlette’s dissertation examines how cultural, economic, and political processes influenced the building culture of the African Methodist Episcopal Church from the late eighteenth century to the 1930s.

Charlette received a bachelor’s in Architecture from Syracuse University and a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Charlette’s work has been supported by the Weitzman’s Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites, where she worked as a Research Fellow; the Society of Architectural Historians, where she serves as Chair on the Graduate Student Advisory Committee; the Historic American Building Survey; and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Charlette was also the Sally-Kress Tompkins Fellow in the summer of 2021. Charlette is currently a dissertation fellow in the Mellon Scholars Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Research/Dissertation

“The Crucible of the Freedom Church: The African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Culture of Building in the United States, 1790s-1930s”

This study examines how cultural, economic, and political processes influenced the building culture of the African Methodist Episcopal Church from the late eighteenth century to the 1930s. Although previous scholarship, mostly in religious and sociological fields, has highlighted the importance of the AME Church in the creation of the Black Church, architectural history has yet to fully investigate the connection between this institution’s building practices and historical perceptions of “Blackness”. This study looks to unearth how Black Church building reflected issues of class and identity amongst AME leadership and its congregants, demonstrating how the AME culture of building formed within a crucible marred by the vestiges of slavery and violence against Black Americans in the United States. As such, this architectural narrative explores regional, national, and international trends in AME Church architecture, showing various spatial counternarratives that complicate racialized minorities as architectural protagonists.