Immersive rhetorics in print media, nineteenth-century popular media, landscape representation, painting, spatial epistemologies, visual culture, the built environment, design history and theory, media history and theory

PhD Landscape Architecture (History & Theory), UIUC

MFA Art Theory & Practice (Printmaking & Photography), Northwestern University

BFA Studio Art (Painting), UIUC

Molly C. Briggs is a landscape historian, design theorist, visual artist, and trained printmaker who studies immersive rhetorics in printed matter in order to discern the mediated shape of built and social space. She teaches core courses in design methods, theory, and research for undergraduates in Graphic Design and graduate students in Design for Responsible Innovation. Professor Briggs holds a PhD in Landscape Architecture History and Theory from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MFA in Printmaking with a minor in Photography from the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University, and a BFA in Painting from the School of Art and Design at Illinois. Her dissertation, The Panoramic Mode: Immersive Media and the Large Parks Movement (2018), examines the commission, design, and reception of large urban park landscapes in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States in the context of a broader mediated culture of immersive spectacle.

Professor Briggs currently serves as President of the International Panorama Council (IPC, Switzerland) and as an Executive Editor of the Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies Yearbook (De Gruyter, Germany, in association with IPC). She is a 2023 Map Library Fellow of the MacLean Collection (Illinois) and is the recipient of numerous scholarly, creative, and pedagogical grants, awards, and recognitions. She has been represented by Zg Gallery in Chicago since 2004.