Michael Lee
Reuben McCorkle Rainey Professor in the History of Landscape Architecture, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

Michael G. Lee is the Reuben McCorkle Rainey Professor in the History of Landscape Architecture and associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia. His research explores the intersection of philosophy, literature, and landscape design, with a particular focus on 18th- to 20th-century Germany. His projects include a study of the infrastructural landscapes of Peter Joseph Lenné in early 19th-century Prussia and an analysis of landscape and gender in Weimar Germany. Lee is the author of The German “Mittelweg”: Garden Theory and Philosophy in the Time of Kant (2007), co-editor with Mirka Beneš of Clio in the Italian Garden: Twenty-First-Century Studies in Historical Methods and Theoretical Perspectives (2011), and co-editor with Kenneth I. Helphand of Technology and the Garden (2014). Lee has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and from Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., where he was also a postdoctoral associate in Garden and Landscape Studies from 2009 to 2012. He has previously taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Connecticut College. Trained as a landscape architect and historian, Lee received an MLA and a PhD from Harvard University and a BSLA from Texas A&M University.