Maria C. Taylor is a historian and theorist of landscape design, environmental relations and international urban planning. Taylor was awarded her PhD at University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), where she received the Distinguished Dissertation in Architecture Award for her 2019 dissertation on Soviet urban environmental design. Taylor also earned a Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington and a MA in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University. Prior to Cornell, Taylor has taught courses in urban environmental history, landscape architecture, and urban planning at Princeton University and the University of Washington in Seattle.  

Originally from Colorado, she has previously lived and studied in Budapest, St. Petersburg, and Krasnoyarsk, as well as research travels across Siberia, European Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and the Xinjiang region of China. Previous support for her research and teaching has come from the Social Science Research Council, the IIE Fulbright Program, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Princeton’s Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Slavic Reference Service’s Research Lab at UIUC, and the University of Michigan’s Graduate School and Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies.