2025 Catherine W. Bishir Prize Recipients

This year we are proud to announce two recipients of the Catherine W. Bishir Prize, Perri Meldon and Hongyan Yang. Hongyan is Core Fellow and visiting assistant professor in history, digital humanities, and comparative migration and ethnic studies at Boston College. Her article, "Homemaking in White America: The Jue Joe Ranch, 1919–1958," appeared in the Fall 2024 edition of Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. Using interviews and a family archive of plans and photographs, Hongyan interprets a Chinese American homestead in the San Fernando Valley as a site of resistance to assimilation. The paper explores multigenerational expressions of identity—Chinese American, middle-class, immigrant—through decorative and spatial strategies and the embodied experiences of homemaking. Hongyang extends Asian American architectural history into the suburbs, complicating and enriching both.

Perri Meldon is a PhD candidate in Boston University’s American & New England Studies Program. Her paper “Tubman’s Blackwater: Wading through Public History at a Wildlife Refuge” was published in the August 2024 issue of The Public Historian. Perri’s essay offers a multi-layered reading of the Chesapeake Bay landscape of Harriet Tubman’s youth with a focus on how various stakeholders—residents, land management agencies, visitors, and resource professionals—contest and reconcile its disparate meanings. Drawing upon interviews, policy analysis, and personal sensory experiences, Perri models the rich, synthetic interpretation of a complex cultural and natural landscape over time. Her paper provides important lessons for multi-modal scholarship and inclusive stewardship. 

Hongyan and Perri uphold and extend VAF’s emphasis on connecting historic moments and sites with present-day concerns. Their papers tie past experiences of placemaking into contemporary issues and continue to open vernacular architectural studies to new subjects, voices, and methodologies. 

• Hongyan Yang, Core Fellow and visiting assistant professor in history, digital humanities, and comparative migration and ethnic studies at Boston College, for her article, "Homemaking in White America: The Jue Joe Ranch, 1919–1958," which appeared in the Fall 2024 edition of Buildings & Landscapes.

• Perri Meldon, PhD candidate in Boston University's American & New England Studies Program, for her article, “Tubman’s Blackwater: Wading Through Public History at a Wildlife Refuge,” which appeared in the Summer 2024 edition of The Public Historian.