Conference Proceedings

• Daniel M. Abramson
• Eric Avila
• Robin Bachin
• Homi Bhabha
• Eve Blau
• Daniel Bluestone
• Zeynep Celik
• Lizabeth Cohen
• Margaret Crawford
• Jeffry Diefendorf
• Robert Fishman
• Alice Friedman
• Paul Groth
• Greg Hise
• Dianne Harris
• Dolores Hayden
• Jane Kamensky
• Mary Lum
• Paula Lupkin
• Martha McNamara
• Jeffrey Melnick
• Steven Nelson
• Wendell Pritchett
• Mary Corbin Sies
• Anne Whiston Spirn
• Nancy Stieber
• Despina Stratigakos
• Ellen Stroud
• Dell Upton
• Camilo José Vergara
• Gwendolyn Wright

Daniel M. Abramson
Panelist: "Where from Here?" Roundtable
Comments (download pdf)
Daniel Abramson received his Ph.D. from Harvard (Fine Arts) and now teaches at Tufts University where he is Associate Professor of Art History and director of Architectural Studies. With a scholarly interest in the relationship between architecture and capitalism, he is the author of Skyscraper Rivals: The AIG Building and the Architecture of Wall Street (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001) and Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society, 1694-1942 (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2005). He is a Fellow in the Warren Center’s Built Environment Workshop this year, working on his current project which explores the theme of obsolescence in modern architecture.

Eric Avila
Respondent: “Reconsidering Race in the Built Environment”
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Eric Avila received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and is currently Associate Professor of History and Chicano Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is author of Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles, published by the University of California Press in August of 2004. He is a Fellow in the Warren Center’s Built Environment Workshop this year, commencing work on Beneath the Shadows of the Freeway: Highway Construction and the Making of Race in the Modernist City.

Robin Bachin
Panelist: "Where from Here?" Roundtable
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Robin F. Bachin is the Charlton W. Tebeau Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1996. Her areas of research and teaching include American urban, environmental, immigration, and cultural history. Her first book, Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890-1919, was published in 2004 by The University of Chicago
Press. Her current book project, Home Away from Home: The Transformation of Seaside Recreation on the East Coast, 1865-2000, focuses on the rapid commercialization of seaside resorts in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Homi Bhabha
Panelist: "Where from Here?" Roundtable
(comments not currently available)
Homi Bhabha received the D.Phil from Christ Church, Oxford, and is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994, new edition, Routledge Classics 2004) and editor of the collection Nation and Narration (Routledge, 1990). Currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Bhabha is finishing a new book entitled A Global Measure, which explores the cultural, ethical, and aesthetic claims that accompany the desire for global progress in an intercultural context.

Eve Blau
Respondent: “Going Public with the Built Environment”
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Eve Blau received her Ph.D. in architectural history from Yale and currently teaches at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Her book, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 (1999), examines the complex interrelation of political program, architectural practice, and urban history in large scale urban intervention, and the process by which architecture and urban design can themselves become agents of social change and collective discourse. Her current research focuses on the city in Central Europe and examines the Socialist cultural legacy in terms of the city and urban architecture.

Daniel Bluestone
Presenter:“Going Public with the Built Environment”
“From Bungalows to Blasted Landscapes:
Preservation’s Politics of Place”
Daniel Bluestone received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and teaches in the University of Virginia's School of Architecture, where he is the director of the Preservation Program. He is the author of the prize-winning Constructing Chicago, and a specialist in 19th-century American architecture and urbanism, and the history and politics of historic preservation in the United States. He has worked extensively on local preservation and community history projects.

Zeynep Celik
Respondent:“Thinking Comparatively
about the American Built Environment”
(comments not currently available)
Zeynep Celik (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1984) is a professor at the School of Architecture, New Jersey Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Remaking of Istanbul (1986), Displaying the Orient (1992), and Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations (1997), and coeditor of Streets: Critical Perspectives on Urban Space (1993), as well as numerous articles on cross-cultural topics. She served as the editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2000-2003) and is currently working on a book titled Public Space, Modernity, and Empire Building. This project is supported by fellowships from ACLS and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Lizabeth Cohen
Co-chair: “The History of the History of the Built Environment”
Conference Introduction (download pdf)
Lizabeth Cohen received her PhD. from the University of California at Berkeley, and currently teaches in Harvard University’s History Department. She is the author of the prize-winning Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, and most recently, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, a study of the political consequences of a mass consumption-oriented economy and culture in post-World War II America. She has begun a book project on the culture and politics of the built environment.

Margaret Crawford
Co-chair: “The History of the History of the Built Environment”
Margaret Crawford received her Ph.D. in urban planning from U.C.L.A. and is currently a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She has also taught at Southern California Institute for Architecture, the University of Southern California, the Universities of California at San Diego and Santa Barbara, and the University of Florence. Her research focuses on the evolution, uses and meanings of urban space. She is the author of Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns and editor of The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life and Everyday Urbanism.

Jeffry Diefendorf
Presenter: “Thinking Comparatively about the American Built Environment”
“I Love That City, But Which City?: Urban Change and Urban Identity in Basel, Boston, and Cologne”
Jeffry Diefendorf received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and has taught at the University of New Hampshire since 1976. Among his major works are In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II and Rebuilding Urban Japan (co-editor). He is currently working on a study of culture, planning, and urban change in Cologne, Basel, and Boston.

Robert Fishman
Presenter: “The History of the History of the Built Environment”
“Site Reading: How Urban History Learned to See”
Robert Fishman received his Ph.D. in History from Harvard, and teaches in the urban design, architecture, and urban planning programs at the Taubman College of the University of Michigan. His major works include Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987) and Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (1977). His most recent work is on urban decentralization.

Alice Friedman
Chair: “Thinking Comparatively About the American Built Environment”
Alice Friedman received her Ph.D. from Harvard (Fine Arts) and is Professor of art, Chair of the Art Department and Co-director, Architecture Program, Wellesley College. She is the author of House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (1989) and Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (1998). She is a Fellow in the Warren Center’s Built Environment Workshop this year, and is working on a book entitled American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture.

Paul Groth
Panelist: "Where from Here?" Roundtable
Comments (download pdf)
Paul Groth is Professor of U.S. Cultural Landscape HIstory and a member of the geography, architecture, and American studies departments at the University of California, Berkeley. He has a professional architecture degree (NDSU, 1972) and a Ph.D. in historical geography (UC Berkeley, 1983). He is the author of Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (1994), and co-editor, with Chris Wilson, of Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson. He is currently studying the interrelationships of work, home, and leisure spaces in blue-collar West Oakland, California.

Dianne Harris
Presenter: “Reconsidering Race in the Built Environment”
“Little White Houses: Critical Race Theory and the Interpretation of Ordinary Dwellings in the United States, 1945-60”
Dianne Harris received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and is currently Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. An interdisciplinary scholar whose areas of expertise include both the Italian Peninsula and the United States, her current research interests include the social and spatial constructions of race and class in the postwar United States. She is the author of several books, including The Nature of Authority: Villa Culture, Landscape, and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy and editor of two books, including Sites Unseen: Essays in Landscape and Vision (forthcoming). Harris's current project examines the ways ordinary postwar U.S. houses and gardens served as frameworks for assimilation and the reinforcement of racial identities and class assignment.

Dolores Hayden
Presenter:“Going Public with the Built Environment”
“Contested Landscapes”
Dolores Hayden, Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University, writes about the history of the built environment and the polticis of design. Her most recent books are A Field Guide to Sprawl (2004) and Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (2003). The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (1995) explores multiethnic Los Angeles. The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981) and Redesigning the American Dream (1984) investigate women's history and housing. Severn American Utopias (1976) analyzes communitarian towns. Hayden studied art, literature, and architecture at Cambridge and Harvard. American Yard (2004) is a collection of her poetry.

Greg Hise
Panelist: "Where from Here?" Roundtable
Comments (download pdf)
Greg Hise received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and is currently associate professor of urban history at the University of Southern California. His books include Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region and Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis. His current research projects include a history of Los Angeles from 1850 to 1930 and a glossary of urban keywords.

Jane Kamensky
Chair: "Where from Here?" Roundtable
Jane Kamensky earned her Ph.D. from Yale, and is the author of Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (Oxford, 1997), and The Colonial Mosaic: American Women, 1600-1760 (Oxford, 1995). She is completing a book called The Exchange Artist: A Story of Paper, Bricks, and Ash in Early National America, a history of the Boston Exchange Coffee House (ca. 1809-1818) and its founder, that will be published by Viking/ Penguin. Kamensky teaches at Brandeis University, and is a Fellow in the Warren Center's Built Environment Workshop this year.

Mary Lum
Chair: “Going Public with the Built Environment”
Currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Mary Lum is a Professor of Painting and Integrated Electronic Arts at Alfred University and will begin teaching at Bennington College in 2005-2006. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes drawing, installation, still and moving images, and artist’s books. Her recent work examines the subtle conditions that are shaped through relationships between fact and fiction and between memory and history. At Radcliffe, Lum is working on Tracing the City, a drawing project that encompasses the experience of living in, wandering through, reading about, recording, and remembering the city.

Paula Lupkin
Respondent: “Going Public with the Built Environment”
Comments (download pdf)
Paula Lupkin received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, teaching modern and American architecture and urban history to students in the departments of architecture, art history, history, and American cultural studies. As a current Fellow at the Charles Warren Center she is completing Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Masking of Modern Urban Culture, a book on the massive building program of the Young Men's Christian Association to be published by the University of Minnesota Press in their new American Culture, Architecture, and Landscape series in 2006. Other research and publication activities include the development of a new world architectural history curriculum and pedagogical tools including an edited volume on the history of cross-cultural exchange in the built environment, Encounters in World Architecture.

Martha McNamara
Panelist: "Where from Here?" Roundtable
Comments (download pdf)
Martha McNamara is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maine where she specializes in the study of vernacular architecture, landscape history, material culture, and the history of New England. She received her Ph.D. in American and New England Studies from Boston University in 1995 and is the author of From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture and Ritual in American Law, 1658-1860 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). At the Warren Center this year she is working on her next book project: a study of the New England landscape and its relationship to New Englanders' sense of place during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Jeffrey Melnick
Presenter: “Reconsidering Race in the Built Environment”
“Project Culture: The Popular Arts of Public Housing”
Jeffrey Melnick is associate professor of American Studies at Babson College, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His works include A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song and Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South and Race and the Modern Artist (co-editor). Melnick is interested in tracing out an alternative history of American housing projects that focuses on their role as a major site for the development of African American music.

Steven Nelson
Respondent:“Thinking Comparatively
About the American Built Environment”
(comments not currently available)
Currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Steven Nelson is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work explores the ways that the visual cultures, architecture, and urbanism of Africa contribute to the construction of different subjectivities on the continent. His manuscript From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture and the Making of Meaning, has been accepted for publication by The University of Chicago Press. His next project is an urban history of Dakar, Senegal. Nelson received his Ph.D. from Harvard.

Wendell Pritchett
Presenter: “Reconsidering Race in the Built Environment”
“From Theory to Practice: Race, Property Values, and Suburban America in the Post-War Years”
Wendell Pritchett, received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and currently teaches in that institution’s law school. He is the author of Brownsville, Brooklyn: Jews, Blacks and the Changing Nature of the Ghetto. His current research examines the development of post-war urban policy, in particular urban renewal, housing finance and housing discrimination, and he is working on a biography of Robert Weaver, the first Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Mary Corbin Sies
Respondent: “Reconsidering Race in the Built Environment”
Comments (download pdf)
Mary Corbin Sies is Director of Graduate Studies and an Associate Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of Maryland. She is an affiliate faculty member of the Women's Studies Department, the African American Studies Department, the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education, and a member of the Historic Preservation faculty. Her works include Planning the American City Since 1900 (co-editor) and "North American Urban History: The Everyday Politics and Spatial Logics of Metropolitan Life," in the Fall 2003 Urban History Review. Sies's interests are the study of race, gender, class, and suburbia.. She received the Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Anne Whiston Spirn
Panelist: "Where from Here?" Roundtable
(comments not currently available)
Anne Whiston Spirn is an author, photographer, landscape architect, and professor of landscape architecture and planning at MIT. Her books include The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (Basic Books, 1984) and The Language of Landscape (Yale, 1998). Since 1984 Spirn has worked on ecological planning and community design and development in inner-city neighborhoods. She has taught at Harvard and at the University of Pennsylvania, where she chaired the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning. She received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University, where she majored in art history, and the master's of landscape architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.

Nancy Stieber
Presenter:“Thinking Comparatively About the American Built Environment”
“Autobiographies and Self-Portraits of the City:
Comparative Sites of Urban Representation”
Nancy Stieber received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her interests include architecture and urbanism from 1750 to the present, particularly in Europe with a focus on the Netherlands, housing reform, and urban representation. She is the current editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Despina Stratigakos
Presenter: “Thinking Comparatively About the American Built Environment”
“Transnational Comparisons of Women as Urban Builders”
Despina Stratigakos is an architectural historian with an overarching interest in gender and modernity in European cities. She is completing a book, A Women's Berlin, that investigates the conception of a city built by and for women, a place that was imagined and partially realized in the years before World War I. Recent publications have addressed the gender politics of the Werkbund, and connections between architectural and sexual discourses in Weimar Germany. Stratigakos received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College and taught at Grinnell College and Illinois State University before joining the faculty of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Harvard in 2003.

Ellen Stroud
Chair:“Reconsidering Race in the Built Environment”
Ellen Stroud is an assistant professor of history at Oberlin College, where she has been teaching environmental and urban history since 2001. Her first book, Seeing The Trees: Urbanization and Reforestation in the Northeastern United States, is nearing completion, and she is spending this year at the Warren Center working on her second book, Dead As Dirt: An Environmental History of the Urban Corpse. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Dell Upton
Presenter: “The History of the History of the Built Environment”
”Gehryism: American Architecture and
the Cultural Authority of Art”
Dell Upton is Harrison Professor of Architectural History and Anthropology at the University of Virginia. He holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University. Upton’s most recent book is Architecture in the United States; among his earlier works are Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia and America's Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups that Built America. He is currently completing a book on urban space and public behavior in antebellum American cities.

Camilo José Vergara
Presenter: “Going Public with the Built Environment”
“Images as a Tool of Discovery, the Camden Website”
Camilo José Vergara has been documenting the changes, and often the decay, of inner city buildings and neighborhoods throughout the nation for more than 30 years. His books (including The New American Ghetto, American Ruins, and the forthcoming How the Other Half Worships) and his numerious exhibitions (including Subway Memories, currently at the Museum of the City of New York) reveal how buildings are often the victims of the changing city scape of America. In 2002, Vergara was awarded a MacArthur grant . His work in progress on Camden, N.J. can be seen at www.camden.rutgers.edu/~hfcy/intro.html.