Emily Chace Morash
Associate Dean of the College and Dean of First-Year Students
As associate dean of the college and dean of first-year students, Emily Morash counsels and advises first-year students on their transition to Connecticut College and academic matters. She and her staff facilitate the First-Year Seminar program and train student advisers (SAs) who work with first-year students as part of the Team Advising program. With the Office of Student Engagement, Morash and her team also organize and run new student Orientation in August and she oversees the selection of the summer reading book for the incoming class.
Morash has previously worked as a visiting instructor in art history and architectural studies. Since joining Connecticut College in 2012, she has taught a range of courses that illustrate how social, political and cultural events shape the built environment, ranging from the Arts and Crafts movement to contemporary architecture to public housing in America.
She worked with the First-Year Seminar Steering Committee, First-Year Seminar Pilot Programs and working groups to develop the First-Year Seminar component of Connections. Her ConnCourse, “Building Culture,” was first offered in 2015-16 and is an interdisciplinary survey of the history of architecture. Morash has also collaborated closely with the Joy Shechtman Mankoff Center for Teaching and Learning, serving most recently as visiting and adjunct faculty coordinator. She has also served as a fellow for the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology.
As an undergraduate student at Smith College, Morash spent a year studying in Florence, Italy, before graduating in 2004 with a bachelor or arts degree in art history and Italian language and literature. She earned a master of arts degree in architectural history from the University of Virginia in 2006. Her master's thesis is titled, “The Città Universitaria and Cultivating a National Identity: Fascist-sponsored Urban Projects and Architecture in Rome.” Morash has worked at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and is the former president of the Thomas Jefferson Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians. She has also taught for the Historic Preservation Program for the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Continuing Education Department.
Her dissertation, "Rethinking Italian Domestic Architecture: Gio Ponti, Milan, and Lo Stile, 1941-1947," examines the development of domestic architecture in the final years of the fascist period and the Second World War and into the immediate postwar period. Her research interests include modern domestic architecture, the role media (film, periodicals and other publications) play in the development of modern architecture, and the publicity of modern architecture through exhibitions. Morash has presented her research at the NESAH Student Symposium and at the Annual Meetings of the Society of Architectural Historians.
