Suzanne Morse Moomaw
Education
The University of Alabama, Ph.D.
The University of Alabama in Birmingham, M.A.
The University of Alabama, B.A.
Biography
Suzanne Morse Moomaw has spent the last four decades observing communities through social, design, and political lens at local, regional, national, and international scales. Before coming to UVA, she worked in higher education senior administration, philanthropy, and, most recently, as president of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, a national urban research and re-granting organization.
Moomaw’s teaching in community economic development challenges students to consider possibilities and create transdisciplinary solutions to the “wicked” problems facing civilization. She involves students—both in and out of the classroom—in wrestling with the systemic causes of issues such as poverty, racial inequities, economic restructuring, human settlements, and lack of affordable housing through historical and cultural frames.
Her primary core courses are the Neighborhood Planning Studio and Neighborhoods, Communities and Regions. Her electives include: Housing and Community Development, Economic Development, and Models of High-Density Housing. She also teaches some popular electives including Community Leadership Change; Politics, Planning and Race; and The Economy and the Environment. Her studio courses give students the opportunity to apply their knowledge of planning and design to reimagine "place” in collaboration with a community partner. Over the years, students have designed a dedicated service center for public housing developments, addressed the challenges of increasing jobs in low-to-middle income neighborhoods, and proposed scenarios for better connecting neighborhoods in cities reeling from urban renewal destruction. In 2012 she founded the Sustainable Europe program offered during Summer Sessions.
The National Academies invited Moomaw to serve on the international expert committee on Urban Sustainability in 2014. She was a 2015 recipient of the All-University Teaching Award by the University of Virginia; in 2017, she received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the Virginia Chapter of the American Planning Association; and in 2021 Excellence in Teaching Abroad. Finally, she was inducted into the Raven Society in 2021 in recognition of her leadership, academic excellence, and service to the university. In 2024 she was elected president of the Academy for Community Engagement Scholarship.
Moomaw's research specialty is post-industrial communities particularly, communities that have depended on manufacturing, extraction, textiles, and agriculture as economic mainstays. Based on a preliminary research project, Design Driven Manufacturing, funded by the Faculty Grants for the Arts in collaboration in 2013-14 with Architecture faculty member, Jeana Ripple, this work explored sustainable products and processes in the bamboo industry. The current international phase of this work is a speculative study of the economic resiliency of Cuban sugar, particularly focused on Hershey, Cuba, and its relationship to United States's interests in the early twentieth century and is a book project in progress, Bittersweet: Extant Sugar Towns and the New Cuba (University of Virginia Press, 2026). It responds to one central research question: How can the design and planning disciplines influence the next iteration of manufacturing, production, and spatiality in post-industrial communities?
Nationally, her research is focused on the revitalization and sustainability of local and regional economies. In 2015, she launched a new project to analyze a subset of the nation’s largest cities with the highest unemployment rate in 1960. This research, Cities Without Work: The Long Road from Boom to Bust, situates 17 post-industrial cities in the United States along a sixty-year trajectory. She received the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities Fellowship in 2017 for the Cities Without Work digital project and the Sorensen Fellowship from the JFK Presidential Library and the Moody Fellowship from the LBJ Presidential Library to support a portion of the archival research. Through the Community Design Research Center, she works on the local and regional scales on design equity issues most recently with her Landscapes of Freedom project tracing the post-emancipation migration and community life in Brown’s Cove in Albemarle County, Virginia. This resulted in an exhibit, Finding Virginia’s Freetowns, Elmaleh Gallery, Fall 2022. This work was supported by the 3Cavalier grant. She was the faculty lead for a number of years of the Appalachian Prosperity Project (APP) working with Southwest Virginia towns on the economic revitalization of their main streets. This funded by the Office of Economic Development at UVA.
Finally, in 2023 the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning Department was selected by the U.S. State Department to lead a Diplomacy Lab project on rebuilding Ukraine. With an interdisciplinary team of 23 undergraduate and graduate students in the School of Architecture, the project, Ukraine's Green Recovery Lab, focused on the city of Izium and received international recognition.
Before coming to the University of Virginia, she was a leader in the philanthropic and non-profit sectors. She served as president of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, director of programs at the Kettering Foundation, and in a variety of administrative positions in liberal arts colleges and research universities. Her most recent book (and the accompanying blog) is Smart Communities: How Citizens and Leaders Can Build a Brighter Future (Second Edition, Jossey-Bass, 2014). It has served as a model of change for literally hundreds of communities worldwide. Earlier, she wrote two research monographs published by ERIC/ASHE in partnership with the George Washington University on the role of corporations in workforce development and the enriched civic role of colleges and universities. These join a whole series of articles, speeches, and commentary on topics ranging from the dropout crisis to Cuban landscapes to communities of the future. She has given invited lectures and presentations at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Scottish Council of Development and Industry, HUD Anniversary of Rural CDBG, Federal Home Loan Bank, Virginia Housing Development Authority, and the Jessie Ball Dupont Fund as well as many communities across the United States.
Nationally, Moomaw has been a Trustee of the Kettering Foundation since 2000 where she has served as Chair of the Board and now serves as Finance and Audit committee chair. She is also President, Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship; Governing Board, Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning; and Faculty Board Member, American Planning Association--Virginia Chapter. Moomaw served on the National Academies Expert Committee on Pathways to Urban Sustainability from 2014-2016, Locally, she is a board member of the Albemarle Housing Improvement Fund (AHIP). At the university, she has served as the Director of the University of Virginia Press from 2019-2022 and as chair of its Board of Directors from 2018-2020. At the School of Architecture, she has been Department Chair of Urban + Environmental Planning since 2021 and Director of the Community Design Research Center since 2014.
Moomaw was named an inaugural Shannon Fellow by the University of Virginia in 2023 to advance her research. She received the All-University Teaching Award in 2017 and the Excellence in Teaching Abroad Award in 2021 from the Provost's Office. In 2011, 2013, and 2018 she was invited by the students in the School of Architecture to give the School's commencement address. In 2006, she received the Content of Our Character award from Duke University. Past board memberships include chair and board member of the Piedmont Community College Board; Campfire, Inc., Paul J. Aicher Foundation; Everyday Democracy, and National Advisory Board of the LBJ School at the University of Texas. She has been a research fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the Center for Organizational and Technological Development at Virginia Tech.
