Dr. Mania Taher is an Assistant Professor at the School of Art & Design, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As an interdisciplinary built environment researcher and designer, Taher explores human-centered design principles through ethnographic studies and analyzes how her research participants physically and sensorially reconstruct spatial memories of everyday objects, activities, and bodily experiences of transnational displacement through spatial mapping. Her upcoming book project explores the world-making of first-generation Bangladeshi immigrant women in New York, primarily by examining their dwellings and a network of locations within their residential environments. In recent years, her research projects have been supported by the Humanities Research Institute (HRI) at UIUC, American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS), the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS).