Amanda Vincent receives distinguished book award

French Studies Associate Professor Amanda Vincent was recently awarded the 2026 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award by the Society of Architectural Historians for her book, “Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City: Paris’ New Parks, 1977-1995.” The Award recognizes the most distinguished works of scholarship in the history of landscape architecture or garden design and was announced on April 15 during the Society’s 2026 Annual Conference in Mexico City, Mexico. 

“Like most academic books, writing this book took a tremendous amount of time and effort to complete, and it’s very satisfying to feel that those efforts have been recognized,” shared Vincent. 

Vincent has always been interested in art and architectural history. The inspiration for the book took shape as she tried to make sense of the complex, puzzling, and intriguing aspects of Paris’s many parks. She felt drawn to “understand their place in French culture and join the conversation with other scholars about urban space and the role of nature in the contemporary world,” said Vincent.

Vincent’s book provides the first cultural history of major new parks developed in Paris in the late twentieth century, as part of the city’s program of adaptive reuse of industrial spaces. Paris’s local government launched a campaign to create parks in the late 1970s that continued into the turn of the millennium. The parks in the book represent this campaign and illustrate different facets of their cultural and historical context.

When discussing her book, Vincent said, “I’m honored, as a non-native speaker of French working in an American institution, with training in language and culture rather than a design background, that my research on French parks and gardens has received this level of recognition.”

Vincent earned her Ph.D. and master’s degree in French from Penn State University, and her Bachelor of Arts from The College of William and Mary in Literary and Cultural Studies. 

Learn more about Vincent’s love of gardening and nature, and more about her award-winning book.