Awards & Honors

Dr. Ethel Goodstein-Murphree B Arch ’75 is one of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s 2022 Distinguished Professor Award winners. Five academics were honored by the organization for their contributions to the academic environment across the combined areas of teaching, scholarship, and service.

The award is meant to recognize “individuals that have had a positive, stimulating, and nurturing influence upon students,” and scholarly achievement that has “produced a body of work that advances understanding of architecture and/or architectural education.” Faculty members with more than ten years of experience were eligible for the nominations-based contest that is limited to full- and candidate-member schools.

“Ethel Goodstein-Murphree is an Architectural Historian, Professor of Architecture, and Associate Dean of the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, where she has taught since 1992. A specialist in American architectural and cultural history, Goodstein’s research focuses on mid-century modernism, the controversies surrounding its preservation, and the importance of placing women in its narrative. In the classroom Goodstein provokes emerging designers to engage the past as a lens through which the wicked problems of the present must be understood. Her former students include an Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award winner, the director of the Ian McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, the executive director of the Mayor’s Institute on City Design, five winners of the AIA’s Young Architect’s Award, and recipients of the New York Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Award. Goodstein’s scholarship has told Arkansas’s architectural story to a national audience but her deepest impact has been made through service on historic district commissions in Arkansas and Louisiana, and on the Board of Directors of Preserve Arkansas. Recognition of her accomplishments include an American Institute of Architects Education Honors Award, the Louisiana Preservation Alliance Award for Excellence in Preservation Education, the Tau Sigma Delta Silver Medal, the Arkansas AIA Award of Merit and Preserve Arkansas’s Parker Westbrook Award for Lifetime Achievement. Goodstein received her B. Arch. from the City College of New York, her M.A. in the history of architecture from Cornell University, and her Ph.D. in history of architecture from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Arkansas, she taught at the University of Louisiana. In service to the profession, Goodstein-Murphree has held leadership positions in the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historian, and as a member of the AIA/ACSA Research Council.”