October 6, 2017 Interior Architecture’s Liz Teston Named Fulbright Scholar

Liz Teston, an assistant professor and James Johnson Dudley Faculty Scholar in the School of Interior Architecture was named a 2017 Fulbright Scholar.

The Core Fulbright Scholar Program is the most widely recognized and prestigious international exchange program in the world. The program offers more than 500 teaching, research or combination teaching/research awards in more than 125 countries. Scholars are chosen based on their leadership and ability to teach, conduct research and contribute solutions for shared international concerns.

Teston will spend seven months in Romania as part of the interior architecture faculty at Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism. There, she will teach a course that focuses on urban spaces, the way people use urban spaces and politics related to design.

Using Romania’s capital, Bucharest, as a subject, Teston will continue her research into political forces that shape interior architecture and design and how those forces filter cultural identity. She believes free-market development and its spatial politics have radically changed the city. Her research will include an empirical analysis of Bucharest’s architecture and observations connected to these theories.

Teston also will further her research conducted for the James Johnson Dudley award on the transient conditions of interiority in downtown Knoxville and Nashville by applying her findings to Bucharest.

In all, three UT professors are serving as Fulbright Scholars this academic year: Tricia Hepner, Department of Anthropology; Mark Hulsether, Department of Religious Studies; and Teston.

This is the second year in a row a professor at the College of Architecture and Design has been named a Fulbright Scholar. In 2016, Brad Collett, associate professor in the School of Landscape Architecture, received the honor. With Teston’s Fulbright award, the faculty in the college now include eight Fulbright Scholars.