Charlette Caldwell

Charlette Caldwell is a Doctoral Candidate and Provost Diversity Fellow studying the history and theory of architecture at Columbia GSAPP. Her research focuses broadly on nineteenth-century American architecture through a vernacular architectural perspective. Charlette’s dissertation examines how cultural, economic, and political processes influenced the building culture of the African Methodist Episcopal Church from the late eighteenth century to the 1930s.

Charlette received a bachelor’s in Architecture from Syracuse University and a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Charlette’s work has been supported by the Weitzman’s Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites, where she worked as a Research Fellow; the Society of Architectural Historians, where she serves as Chair on the Graduate Student Advisory Committee; the Historic American Building Survey; and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Charlette was also the Sally-Kress Tompkins Fellow in the summer of 2021. Charlette is currently a dissertation fellow in the Mellon Scholars Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia.