Mania Tahsina Taher

Mania Taher’s research explores feminist object practices and activities inside American dwelling spaces. Everyday vernacular objects play a primary role in her research investigating the cultural landscapes of new immigrants with inquiries of displacement, gender, and race. As an interdisciplinary built environment researcher and designer, Mania Taher explores human-centered design principles through ethnographic studies— she visits, documents, and analyzes the built environment, and hears the user’s voices to draw a holistic experience of the larger social, cultural, historical, and ecological landscape. Since joining the department in Fall 2024 as a tenure-track faculty member, Dr. Taher has been teaching design studios, in addition to offering courses on human-centered design principles and product development through the lens of social design.

Mania Taher’s academic background lies at the intersection of architecture and urban design. Her upcoming book project explores the world-making of first-generation Bangladeshi immigrant women in New York, primarily by examining their dwellings and a network of locations within their residential environments. Dr. Taher analyzes her research participants’ physical and sensory ways of reconstructing spatial memories related to their everyday objects, activities, and bodily experiences of transnational displacement through spatial mapping. Dr. Taher’s broader research interest also focuses on the material and spatial histories of South Asia. In recent years, her research projects have been supported by the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS), the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS).