BLC Field School Receives Wisconsin Humanities Council Grant
The Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures program annual field school, this year called "Picturing Milwaukee: Washington Park" and being directed by UWM Associate Professor Arijit Sen, has been awarded a competitive $9978 Public Humanities Grant from the Wisconsin Humanities Council. A primary component of the BLC curriculum for students from UW-Madison and UWM, this field school project seeks to employ the enduring creativity of storytelling, the power of digital humanities, and depth of local knowledge in order to galvanize Milwaukee residents to talk about their homes as repositories of community memory, spaces of caring, and markers of civic pride. With the help of the grant from the WHC, the BLC Field School will have the capability to expand the students' final presentations beyond traditional physical exhibits through the use of documentary shorts and a digitally enhanced neighborhood heritage tour. These additions will broaden the range of available methods for analyzing vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes. Field School runs June 9–July 11, with the final exhibit opening July 25 at the Washington Park Partners public hall. Contact Prof. Arijit Sen for more information: sena@uwm.edu. Interested UW–Madison students should contact Prof. Anna Andrzejewski for information on enrolling for Madison credit: avandrzejews@wisc.edu. For more info about the field school, see www.SeeSchool.weebly.com. 

Welcome to the Buildings-Landscapes-Culture Program's new website!

We hope this new look will help visitors, students, and participants find out more about the program, our history, and what's been going on recently. New features include:

The BLC Fieldwork Archive Page
Under the Resources tab, this page will have links to online and downloadable material related to field projects from past years. BLC classes always involve on-the-ground field research, which generate drawings, photographs, maps, essays, histories of buildings, neighborhoods, and communities. This is a great place to get a sense of what BLC students do. This page is still under construction but will be growing. Please check back often!

BLC Students page 
A better student page introduces visitors to BLC students and recent graduates in Milwaukee and Madison. 

Resources
In addition to the fieldwork archive, we have set up a space for students and faculty to share their work. This will include a syllabus exchange, bibliographies and reading lists from BLC students' PhD exams, conference papers and anything else that we want to share. 

This What's New? Page
While BLC has been keeping a few different blogs, we plan to consolidate and make all of our news announcements here. So please click the "What's New?" button to keep up with news from BLC!

We look forward to making this new website a gathering place for students, faculty, project participants, and prospective students. Welcome!
— Sarah Fayen Scarlett, BLC Program PhD Candidate and project assistant

Check out this article that promoted the Vernacular Architecture Forum annual conference before it came to Madison in 2012:
Wisconsin State Journal (Apr. 9, 2012)