Speakers


PRESENTERS

 

Erik Carver (Columbia University)

Currently a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and a lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design,  Carver has previously worked as an architectural designer and taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. With Janette Kim, he published The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), an exploration of architecture’s role in political ecology that was supported by awards from the Van Alen Institute and the Graham Foundation. Carver specializes in 19th-century American architecture and in the history of science and technology. His dissertation shows how architects were central to industrialization in America and abroad through their active coordination of technical and design discourses.

Edward Eigen (Harvard University)

Associate Professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Eigen is a scholar whose work focuses on the intersection of the human and natural sciences. His most recent publication is the collection of essays, On Accident: Episodes in Architecture and Landscape (MIT Press, 2018).  Eigen is currently preparing to publish An Anomalous Plan, which discusses the development of laboratory spaces in nineteenth-century France. He has received fellowships from CASVA and the Dibner Institute.

Janna Israel (The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art)

Currently completing her manuscript As Though another Byzantium: Ruins, Artifacts, and Conflict in Renaissance Venice”, which investigates the appropriation and exchange of cultural artifacts and design motifs between the Venetians and the Ottomans after the conquest of Constantinople in the mid-fifteenth century. Her research has been supported by the American Academy in Rome, the Renaissance Society of America, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and MIT, where she received her Ph.D. Next year, she will be postdoctoral fellow at the Villa I Tatti to research her project on early modern metalwork.

Lauren Jacobi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Class of 1942 Career Development Associate Professor of architectural history in the History, Theory + Criticism section of the Department of Architecture, MIT.  A scholar of early-industrial and early modern Europe, she is finishing a book manuscript, under contract with Cambridge University Press, that probes historical relationships between banks and religious behavior, exploring urban geographies and architectural forms that unveil moral attitudes toward money during the birth of capitalism.  She is currently developing a project for publication about the nomos of the sea in which she studies how spatial practices extended to aquatic realms in the pre-industrial Mediterranean world, including how the spatial domain was defined through maritime jurisdiction.  Her research has been supported by the Kress Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the Morgan Library and Museum, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Academy in Rome.

Ijlal Muzaffar (Rhode Island School of Design)

Ijlal Muzaffar is an Assistant Professor of Modern Architectural History at the Rhode Island School of Design. Before RISD, he taught at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he was Visiting Faculty at the Department of Art History and the Center for the Study of Global Change. He has also taught at the Program in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art at MIT, from where he also received his PhD in 2007. He also holds a Master of Architecture degree from Princeton, and a BA in mathematics and physics from the University of Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan. He is working on a book based on his dissertation that looks at how modern architects and planners played a critical role in shaping the discourse on Third World development and its associated structures of power and intervention in the postwar era.

Daria Ricchi (University of Oxford)

Ph.D. Princeton University, is an architectural historian and writer. She is a regular contributor to architectural magazines and academic journals. Her dissertation focused on architectural historiography and its literary genres between 1930s and 1950s. More broadly, her research interests include: writerly modes in the historiography of architecture, modern and contemporary art and architecture, and popular culture. She is currently a visiting fellow at Oxford University where she is studying the early architectural writing by the American novelist Edith Wharton, and how writing targeted both a specialized audience and a broader public.


 

RESPONDENTS 

(Boston University Faculty)

 

Ross Barrett (History of Art & Architecture) recently published Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-Century American Art (California, 2014).  Current work on visual culture and real estate.

Amy Brodeur (Anatomy & Neurobiology), forensic scientist, specializes in crime scene investigation and teaches in the School of Medicine, where she is Assistant Director of the Biomedical Forensic Sciences program.

Arianne Chernock (History) researches modern British and European history, and author of Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism (Stanford, 2010).  “Evidence in/as History,” a past course offering. 


MODERATORS

Daniel M. Abramson, Michael Osman, Zeynep Çelik Alexander