Dolores Hayden is professor emerita of architecture, urbanism, and American studies at Yale University. A renowned scholar of the history of the American urban landscape and the politics of place, her works have been translated into over a dozen languages. She is the author of many award-winning books including Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (Pantheon, 2003), A Field Guide to Sprawl (W.W. Norton, 2004), and Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life (W.W. Norton, 2002), titles that have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, CNN and The Diane Rehm Show.

Hayden's earlier works include Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975 (MIT Press, 1976) and The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (MIT Press, 1981), which introduced the activists she calls material feminists.

A former president of the Urban History Association, and a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians, Hayden is the recipient of the Radcliffe Graduate Medal for outstanding scholarship, an American Library Association Notable Book Award, two awards for Excellence in Design Research from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paul Davidoff Award for an outstanding book in urban planning, the Donald Award and the Oculus Award for feminist scholarship. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute, the NEH, the NEA, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.