Tara Bissett, PhD (She/Her)

Tara Bissett is a scholar of the built environment and an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, where she was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellow. Her research approaches architecture as an expanded field, tracing how spatial practice circulates through ephemera and everyday instruments, including magazines, philanthropic infrastructures, handbooks, and welfare legislation. She is especially interested in how women shaped spatial forms of philanthropy and territorial control. She is currently co-authoring a book with Amari Peliowski, Together in the World: Spatial Genealogies of Care, forthcoming Summer 2026.

Her recent work explores where the home ends and the institution begins by investigating the histories of women’s shelters, halfway homes, and reform institutions. Spanning 1750 to 1950, this research traces the migration of reform policies, buildings, and reformers from the United Kingdom to its colonies, and analyses how exclusionary legislation was translated into spatial and architectural practice within women’s reform. It also considers communality as a condition shaped through unruly practices, attending to the fraught terrain where home, shelter, and penitentiary converge.

Tara is committed to collaborative and community-led approaches to teaching, design, and scholarship. She has chaired panels and presented on experimental pedagogies and disability-first methodologies at venues including RAIC and SAH. Her work advances disability justice through pedagogical methods for disability inclusion.

She teaches design studio and Cultural History courses. Recent studios include Designing for Every Body, focused on disability inclusion, and The Child in the City, which foregrounded community engagement with children. Her elective Architecture of Containment was a seminar that culminated in the exhibition UnRuly: Counter-Archiving Women’s Reform. Tara serves on the University of Waterloo Racial Equity and Environmental Justice Task Force and is Chair of the Admissions Committee.

• Architectural History and Theory

• Feminism and Gender

• Carceral Histories

• Disability Histories

• Institutions of Care, Welfare and Philanthropy (Including Reformatories and Trade Schools)

This research examines institutions of care, women’s shelters, and reformatories, with particular attention to the shifting threshold where domestic space hardens into institutional form. Spanning 1750 to 1950, it follows the movement of reform policies, buildings, and reformers from the United Kingdom to its colonies, and investigates how exclusionary legal frameworks were materialised in architectural layouts, interior routines, and everyday regimes of labour and supervision. At the centre of this work is an account of how women shaped spatial practices of philanthropy and control, and how communality was negotiated through unruly practices across the contested terrain linking home, shelter, and penitentiary. Articles drawn from this research have been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Clara and the Journal of Architecture and Design, with forthcoming work in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and Architectural Histories. This work also informs the co-authored book with Amari Peliowski, Together in the World: Spatial Genealogies of Care.

• 2025 Faculty of Engineering Distinguished Performance Award

• 2025 Bob Harding and Lois Claxton Humanities and Social Sciences Endowment Fund (Together in the World: Spatial Genealogies of Care)

• 2024 LITE Grant (Beyond the Checklist: Generating and Assessing Accessibility Awareness in Spatial Design Education)

• 2024 Nomination- OUSA Award for Excellence in Teaching

• 2024 UW SSHRC Exchange Grant

• 2023 UW SSHRC Explore/ SEED Grant

• 2021 OUSA Award for Excellence in Teaching

• 2025- Current Chair Admissions Committee

• 2020- Current Committee Member Racial Equity and Environmental Justice Committee

• 2022- 2024 Co-Chair Lecture Series

• Docomomo Ontario

• ARCH 246 - Cultural Encounters 600-1600
  • Taught in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
• ARCH 342 - Modernisms: Local and Global
  • Taught in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026
• ARCH 393 - Option Design Studio
  • Taught in 2022, 2023
• ARCH 485 - Architectural Research
  • Taught in 2025
• ARCH 642 - Modernism to the 21st Century
  • Taught in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026
• ARCH 690 - Design Studio
  • Taught in 2023

* Only courses taught in the past 5 years are displayed.

• Tara Bissett & Amari Peliowski, Together in the World: Spatial Genealogies of Care. Ediciones ARQ, forthcoming 2026.

• Tara Bissett. “Outside Architecture: Making Feminist Space through Manuals, Tools, and Service.” Feminist Encounters (special issue on Feminist spatial practices for social equality), March 2026, 1–18.

• Tara Bissett. “Doing Time: The Institutional Rhythm of Reform and Resistance in Women’s Industrial Reformatories.” Journal of Architectural Design and History, no. 4 (2025): 1–19.

• Tara Bissett. “Building, Dwelling, Sustaining: Learning from Women’s Cooperatives.” Clara, no. 10 (2024): 48–63.

• Tara Bissett. “From Carpenter’s Tool to Code Compliancy: The Vicissitudes of the Standard.” Critic|All (2023): 47–56.

• Tara Bissett. “Conflicts of Care: Contesting Visions of Urban Reform.” Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada 47, no. 1 (2023): 43–58.

• Arch Daily- Exhibition Opening - UnRuly. Counter Archiving Women's Reform Exhibition
• Cambridge Today- UnRuly