Columbia Professor Investigates History on Popular PBS Show

When a British television producer called Gwendolyn Wright a decade ago to ask if she would be interested in hosting a new TV show, she quipped, "You do realize I'm a 55-year-old woman?" Age, it turns out, did not matter. The producer wanted her for her expertise in American architecture and urbanism. In season two, Wright, with an archaeologist, investigates 17th-century artifacts, including this clay tobacco pipe, found atop a dead body discovered in an old basement. The show was History Detectives , which is entering its ninth season. It is consistently among the three most-watched shows on PBS each summer, along with Antiques Roadshow . "It's terrific," says Wright, a professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. "It has been a nice opportunity for me to actually bring scholarship into a medium that often doesn't follow it and to discover there's a sizeable public who really likes it." Wright is a co-host with four other experts in history, sociology, anthropology and art history, helping to trace the history of a wide selection of artifacts, houses and even locations.