He taught for many years at UC Berkeley, before moving in 2002 to the University of Virginia, where he was David A. Harrison Professor of Anthropology and Architecture, with appointments in the School of Architecture and the department of anthropology.[8][9] He resumed teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles as Professor of Architectural History and chair of the Department of Art History.
Upton authored the 1998 textbook Architecture in the United States for the Oxford University Press' Oxford Art History series and American Architecture, A Thematic History with Oxford in 2019. Upton has written extensively on vernacular landscapes of the American built environment. His work on Colonial and Antebellum America include Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (Yale University Press, 2008), Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (MIT Press, 1986), Madaline: Love and Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (University of Georgia Press, 1996), and America’s Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups That Built America (Preservation Press, 1986). As a founding member of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, Upton has published on materialist history and theory as separate from canonical architectural histories in works such as Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, with John Michael Vlach (University of Georgia Press, 1986) and "Architecture History or Landscape History?" in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (August 1991). He wrote the chief essay for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition "Art and the Empire City: New York 1825–1861 in 2000.[10][11] He examined histories of civic memorials in What Can and Can't Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (Yale University Press, 2015).
^Middle name and birth year are from the Copyright Catalog of the United States Copyright Office, entry for Early vernacular architecture in southeastern Virginia (1981). http://cocatalog.loc.gov/
^Dell Thayer Upton, “Early Vernacular Architecture in Southeastern Virginia.” Ph.D. dissertation. Brown University Committee on American Civilization, 1979. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1980 no. 8111189.
