Professor Brandt’s scholarship asks questions about how Americans use historic places and architecture to remember the past. She has taught the history and theory of architecture, American art, and historic preservation at USC since 2011 and was promoted to full professor in 2021.
Professor Brandt’s current research focuses on the architectural stereotype of the white-columned plantation house. She is co-authoring a book with Philip Mills Herrington (Associate Professor, James Madison University) on the subject and their article, “The Antebellum Plantation of Stone Mountain, Georgia,” was published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians in 2022 and won that year’s award for best article from the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.
Professor Brandt is also currently co-editing a volume of essays on the history of modern architecture in the US South with Daniel Vivian (Associate Professor, University of Kentucky). Modernism Below the Mason-Dixon Line: Architecture in the American South, 1920s-1980s is under advanced contract with University of Virginia Press with a projected publication date in 2026.
Professor Brandt is known nationally for her expertise on George Washington’s Mount
Vernon and memory in American architecture and landscapes. Her book, First in the Homes of His Countrymen: George Washington's Mount Vernon in the American
Imagination (UVA Press, 2016), received the Henry-Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society
in America in 2018. Her work on the South Carolina state house grounds and its monuments
includes a guidebook (published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2021), an online tour, and a podcast produced with Historic Columbia thanks to a grant from South Carolina Humanities.
Professor Brandt has also contributed essays to volumes published by the University
of Virginia Press, USC Press, and Carnegie Mellon University Press, and to the journals
Winterthur Portfolio, The Public Historian, Imprint, Antiques & Fine Art , and Arris. Fellowships and grants from the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of
George Washington at Mount Vernon, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Winterthur
Museum and Gardens, and USC have supported her research.
Professor Brandt is a dedicated advocate for local history and preservation. She has
authored/co-authored six historic district nominations to the National Register of
Historic Places in Virginia, South Carolina, and Illinois. In 2021 with Staci Richey
of Access Preservation, she conducted a survey of 721 resources in downtown Columbia, 60% of which were built between 1945 and 1974. She sat on the SC state board of
review for the National Register of Historic Places from 2013 until 2018.
Dr. Brandt has distinguished herself in service to the field of architectural history as well as to the University of South Carolina. She is the former co-editor of Buildings & Landscapes, the Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, and President of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians. She is one of three USC professors who led the campaign for a monument to the university’s first African American professor, Richard T. Greener, erected in early 2018. She earned USC’s Distinguished Research Service Award in 2024, the Fresh Voices in the Humanities Award from South Carolina Humanities in 2021, and was recognized with a Special Contribution Award from Historic Columbia in 2020. Dr. Brandt received USC’s Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2015 and has served on more than 35 thesis committees at USC. She has chaired the Teaching Committee in the School of Visual Art and Design since 2019 and has served on USC’s Design Review Committee since 2024.
Outside of academic life, Dr. Brandt is mother to two not-very-bright shih tzus (Tom Petty and Bob Seger); hawks vintage stuff over Instagram and in local shops; and travels with her friends and family to see the world’s best (and worst) architecture.
Classes
- ARTH 105 | History of Western Art I
- ARTH 337 | Modern Architecture
- ARTH 542 | American Architecture