Heather Snyder Quinn and Seth Denizen Join Faculty

The Sam Fox School is pleased to announce a pair of new faculty appointments for the fall. Heather Snyder Quinn will join the communication design faculty as an assistant professor in design futures. Heather has expertise in typography as well as interaction design, and will be a key contributor to the growth of studies in Human-Computer Interaction and Design Futures as strategic priorities for the School. Seth Denizen will join our faculty as an assistant professor of landscape architecture. Seth is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture and human geography. His position is part of Washington University’s Race and Ethnicity Cluster Hire Initiative, sponsored by the Provost’s Office, and it is also a special joint cluster hire in Environmental Justice, in partnership with Biology and Anthropology. You can learn more about their teaching and experience below.

Heather Snyder Quinn comes to the Sam Fox School from DePaul University, where she is an assistant professor of design in the College of Computing and Digital Media, as well as a 2021-22 Wicklander Fellow from DePaul’s Institute for Business and Professional Ethics and a 2021-22 OpEd Public Voice Fellow from DePaul’s College of Communications. Her work uses design fiction to challenge technocratic power and imagine the future impacts of emerging technology on human freedoms. Heather regularly serves as a bridge between academia and industry. Her writing is published by The World Economic Forum, Slanted Magazine, and AIGA. Her project “Using Speculative Design to Inform Tech Policy for the Metaverse” was presented at Yale Law School’s Technologies of Deception Conference. Most recently, Heather launched “Mariah: Acts of Resistance,” a site-specific, augmented reality application that narrates stories of historical injustice through the backdrop of significant cultural institutions and the funding that has allowed them to exist. Mariah has received considerable press from The Washington Post and Hyperallergic.

Heather earned her BFA in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design in 1996 and taught there from 2001-2010. In 2018 she earned her MFA in Graphic Design from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture and human geography. His published work is multidisciplinary, addressing art and design, microbial ecology, soil science, urban geography, and the politics of climate change. He is currently a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and his doctoral research investigates the vertical geopolitics of urban soil in Mexico City, where he is working with geologists and soil scientists to characterize the material complexities and political forces that shape the distribution of geological risk in Mexico’s urban periphery.

Seth has taught landscape architecture at the University of Hong Kong, University of Virginia, and Harvard University. In 2019 he was awarded the SOM Foundation Research Prize with Montserrat Bonvehi and David Moreno Mateos for their investigation of wastewater urbanism in the Mezquital Valley, Mexico. He is currently a Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities alongside a small cohort, teaching courses and contributing to the initiative’s continuing theme, “Cities on the Edge: Hemispheric Comparisons and Connections,” as well as participating in social justice-oriented scholarship and civic engagement within urban studies. He is currently teaching a course based on his research called “Thinking Through Soil.”