Newtown native Karen Lewis, associate professor of architecture at The Ohio State University, will share her current research on the historic Midwest and Northeast route used by slaves seeking liberation. “The Underground Railroad: An Architect’s View” will be presented Tuesday, July 18, at 6:30 pm, at Trinity Episcopal Church, 36 Main Street.

Bringing together archival research through maps, animations, and other visual representations, Professor Lewis will talk about the ways the Underground Railroad was formed.

“The Underground Railroad was not only safe houses coordinated by white abolitionists, but a series of unpredictable routes, landscapes, structures, and spaces, spontaneously invented by Black men and women seeking liberation,” said Lewis, a 1993 graduate of Newtown High School.

The program will offer an open, thoughtful exploration about how current discourse around the Underground Railroad expands the collective imagination about enslavement and liberation.

Lewis’s research and teaching address how visual and information systems shape the architectural, territorial, and infrastructural space they create and inhabit. She theorizes the entanglement of how these spaces rely upon and embed information into their structures, systems and organizational logics through design and writing.

As an undergraduate at Wellesley College, Lewis was introduced to complex spatial mapping and multi-dimensional graphics when studying astronomy. She worked in New York as a museum exhibition designer, user-interface designer, and a toy-design researcher before beginning her master’s in architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, completing her thesis on spatial logistics.

As associate professor of architecture at The Ohio State University, Professor Lewis has expanded her research in the graphics of spatial complexity, turning her attention to the stories hidden within archives. She has held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, Newberry Library, and through the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the 19th Century visualization strategies, maps and graphic tools of the transcontinental American west, with a focus on the visualizations of the Army Corps of Topographic Engineers.

Her book, Graphic Design for Architects (Routledge, 2015) pedagogically positions issues of architectural representation through the lens of information design and visual communication. It is one of the publisher’s best performing architecture publications of the 21st Century.

Lewis’s current research visualizes the Underground Railroad, providing critical counter-narratives through mapping, drawing, and writing.

All are welcome for the free program at Trinity Church. For additional information contact Kim Merrill at kmerrill@trinitynewtownct.org or 203-426-9070