KENNESAW, Ga. | Sep 1, 2022

Marietta Monaghan began as an adjunct professor in 2005 at SPSU, in Marietta, GA. Now on her seventeenth year on this campus, she teaches or has taught: First Year Studio, Design Foundation Introduction, Summer Workshop, Cultures I, Cultures II, Cultures III, Design Communication I, and GRE Prep courses for foreign and non-traditional students.

Marietta is interested in sustainable development in architecture and applies those same ideas to the mentoring of high school students who might be interested in becoming architects. She attends workshops and lectures on sustainability to broaden her knowledge of the ever-expanding subject. She participates in various committees, notably Marietta High School’s Career Path Discovery, Pre-Engineering and Pre-Architecture Boards and their Engineering Pipeline Extravaganza held twice each year. This helps Marietta to recruit architecture students from local high schools. To that end, she developed and ran (since 2014) the Summer Academies for the ACCI SPIKE Studio, an introduction for middle and high school students to the college courses they will encounter, one held at Georgia Tech and one at KSU. It has been a resounding success and is ongoing again after a COVID hiatus. The last year at KSU (2019, before the pandemic), our Summer Academy students designed homeless shelters and built one to donate to the Mad Housers group, so that a homeless person now has a place to call home. Marietta is a firm believer in hands-on learning; Summer Academy students had an introduction to hand tools and construction techniques that will positively influence the rest of their lives. She and her colleagues were presented with the AIA Bronze Medal Award for community outreach later that same year.

Volunteer work is at the heart of community participation and involvement. Marietta feels it is imperative that she give back to the educational and social organizations which helped to nurture her, so she is delighted to serve on committees like the University wide Education Abroad Advisory and Standing Committees, and the smaller Department of Architecture Study Abroad committees over the years. Marietta regularly volunteers as a docent at the local art museum and reads for conference acceptance and review for the proceedings of conferences such as NCUR and SESAH.