Morgan Newman is a Ph.D. candidate in Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She received her BA in public policy and sociology from Vanderbilt University in 2019 and her masters in public policy with a concentration in architecture and design from Carnegie Mellon in May 2022. Newman draws on her policy and social justice background to examine marginalized communities' lived experiences within their built environment.

Her doctoral research applies southern environmental histories, abolition ecologies, and architectural and spatial analysis to examine the relationship between race, space, and environmental injustice in the United States South, particularly within Alabama’s Black Belt region. She is interested in exploring how defining a Black Belt spatial politic might be useful when dreaming of collective decolonial spatial imaginaries. Her research explores generative processes of repair in its many forms including social/relational repair, ecological repair, and material repair as an ongoing process that has deep roots in the Black Belt region and culture. Originally from Alabama, she mainly focuses her research on Black rural Southern communities but understands the relationship between race/racism, organized abandonment, and environmental degradation takes various forms across the globe and are remnants of the same colonial afterlives.

#FreePalestine. Liberation for all. From every river to every sea.