Margaret Supplee Smith

Harold W. Tribble Professor Emerita

American and Modern Architecture

E-mail: smith@wfu.edu
CV: link

After receiving her PhD from Brown University, Smith taught at Boston University where she was the founding director of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation. A four-term chair of the Department of Art, she has taught art and architectural history at Wake Forest since 1979 and helped to establish the college’s Women’s Studies Program. She coordinated the North Carolina Women’s History Project for the NC Museum of History and curated the exhibition that opened the museum’s new building in 1994. She co-authored the award-winning North Carolina Women: Making History (UNC Press, 1999). She has lectured and written widely on ski resort architecture and consulted for the city of Aspen on its modern architecture. Her recent research on the American Ski Resort: Architecture, Experience and Style was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in July 2013.She is currently researching a book on “Great Houses: A Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Story” sponsored by Preservation NC.

Publications

American Ski Resort: Architecture, Style, Experience
by Margaret Supplee Smith
“A lavishly illustrated exploration of the American ski resort and its evolution across time. Focusing on destination ski resorts in New England, the Rocky Mountains, the Far West, and southern Canada, Smith examines the architecture of recreational skiing from the 1930s to 1990, showing how small, family-operated businesses evolved into the massive, theme-oriented, multipurpose ski establishments of today.”
– University of Oklahoma Press (July 2013)

North Carolina Women: Making History 
by Margaret Supplee Smith and Emily Herring Wilson (University of North Carolina Press, 1999; paperback, 2007)
“The most comprehensive book of women’s history ever produced for a single state”
This lively and comprehensive volume—filled with narratives of adventure, hardship, achievement, and happiness, as well as the quieter day-to-day events of ordinary life—finally accords North Carolina women their long-awaited place in history.
The authors bring together a wealth of materials to demonstrate how North Carolina women lived, from the dates of early native settlements to the end of World War II. Filled with names, places, colorful anecdotes, and more than 200 hundred photographs and documents that bring to life important moments on history, this is the first book to reveal the influence of women in shaping North Carolina’s character, economy, and values.
The narratives embedded in women’s history, presented chronologically, create an enormous landscape across time—broadly analyzed and meticulously detailed. By considering the particular contours of gender, race, class, religion, and geography, the authors reveal the diversity and complexity of women’s lives and experiences.
“This is a book for all North Carolinians of whatever race, age or sex . . . . It does more than add a dimension to North Carolina history: it significantly reorders the past.”
– Anne Firor Scott, Duke University

“Charles Barton Keen, 1868-1931” NC Architects & Builders (2013)
“Aspen’s Twentieth-Century Architecture: Modernism: 1945-1975” City of Aspen (2010)