Dianne Harris is a senior program officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation where she focuses on Higher Education and Scholarship in the Humanities.
Her scholarship, which has a broad temporal and geographic reach spanning from 18th-century Lombardy to the postwar United States, is united by a constant interest in the relationship between the built environment and the construction of racial and class identities. She is particularly well-known for her scholarly contributions to the study of "race and space." Her award-winning publications include the co-edited volumes Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France (2001), and Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision(2007). She is editor of Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania(2010), and she is the author of three monographs: The Nature of Authority: Villa Culture, Landscape, and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy (2003); Maybeck’s Landscapes: Drawing in Nature(2005); and Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (2013).