This spring, 2007, Professor Leanne G. Rivlin will retire from her full-time faculty position in the Environmental Psychology Doctoral Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Professor Rivlin’s academic career at CUNY began in 1960 at City College where she taught as a Lecturer in the Department of Education. At Hunter College, she served as a Research Consultant for two years and then proceeded to work as a Research Associate at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center on a longitudinal study of hospital ward design. She continued her investigations of institutional spaces as a Research Associate through the 1960s.

 

Leanne Rivlin was an originator of the Environmental Psychology Doctoral Program in the late 1960s. Part of an exciting movement of interdisciplinary and action-oriented research, environmental psychology came into being at this time to study the relationships between people and the environment in the interests of positively influencing the design and use of the built environment. Joining the faculty in 1974 as an Associate Professor, Lee began her extraordinary career as an educator of doctoral students. Her work at the time focused on understanding how children’s environments affected their behavior and academic performance. As a primary or co-author on a number of seminal publications in the expanding field of environmental psychology, including its first subject-specific textbooks, Professor Rivlin helped to lay the foundation for an interdisciplinary field that continues to thrive internationally. Leanne became a  full Professor in 1985, as her research shifted to address the life of public spaces, the pressing issues of homelessness, and everyday practices of community making. She also began to write about research ethics and to address the practical, political, and ethical concerns raised by environmental social science field research. More recently she has developed a body of work on sociospatial conflict at all scales. In each of these broad areas, Professor Leanne Rivlin has made profound and lasting contributions to the field.

 

As Leanne becomes a Professor Emeritus this year, we acknowledge her forty-seven years of dedicated scholarship to the City University of New York, New York City, and the academic community at large.