Ethan Carr

Ethan Carr, PhD, FASLA, is professor of landscape architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a landscape historian and preservationist specializing in public landscapes, particularly U.S. municipal and national park planning and design. Carr received his Masters in Art History from Columbia, his Masters in Landscape Architecture from Harvard, and his PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art. His career in the fields of landscape architecture and historic preservation began while working for the New York City Parks Department and the National Park Service. He has also worked for non-profit organizations and private design offices. He has taught at the Harvard GSD, the University of Virginia, and at the University of Massachusetts, where he is currently directing the graduate landscape architecture program. He has written two award-winning books, Wilderness by Design (1998) and Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park Dilemma (2007). He is the volume editor of Volume 8 of the Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, The Early Boston Years, 1882-1890 (2013), and the lead editor of Public Nature: Scenery, History, and Park Design (University of Virginia Press, 2013). His latest books are The Greatest Beach (2016), a history of the Cape Cod National Seashore, and Olmsted and Yosemite, Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea (2022).