My Cornell students have been willing to take on chances with me, enriching my courses and scholarship. Whether I am teaching or curating or writing about historical and contemporary material, I unpack and foreground architectural intentions, processes, and constraints as well as social, economic, and cultural meanings. History and theory are creative and evolving dialogues where the past, present, and future jostle one another, and I explore them at different scales and across different disciplines. Thus “architectures” of the book, drawing, model, cinema, photograph, land, and city intrigue me as much as the building. My research feeds into my teaching. In the past few years I have completed a book on photography and the American built environment (Beyond the Architect's Eye (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)) that arose from courses and seminars taught on Miami, New York City, and the city, film, and photography. A recent on project female architects in Mumbai and Delhi (for which I was in India last year on a senior research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies) was first explored in a seminar on comparative modernities with students from design, theory, and history. My seminars involve design projects as well as research papers. In spring 2007 I taught a seminar on Gordon Matta-Clark, artist and Cornell-trained architect. The students curated an exhibition at the Johnson Museum and created films, installations, performance pieces, and soundscapes for the conference "Matta-Clark at Cornell: Past, Present, and Future" held in Ithaca with speakers from around the world. We are now preparing an online publication of this conference. Currently I am teaching in interdisciplinary seminar on books of architecture and architectures of the book with students from design, art history, and architectural history. This spring Professor Sabine Haenni (from the departments of American Studies and Theatre, Film, and Dance) and I will collaborate on a lecture course Cities on the Edge: New York and Los Angeles on Film. We have organized a conference, "Mean Streets: Violence and the Cinematic City," with fil makers, critics, and historians from Cornell, India, Brazil, and the U.K.
education
- 1983, Ph.D., Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, Dissertation: “The American Architect and Building News, 1876-1907”
- 1978, M. Phil. And M. A., Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
- 1972, B. A. , Magna Cum Laude, Department of Art History, Duke University
publications
- “Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment”, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009
- “The First Professional: Benjamin Henry Latrobe,” essay in American Architectural History, Routledge Press, 2004
- “After-Images of the ‘New’ New York and the Alfred Stieglitz Circle,” essay in After-Images of the City, Cornell University Press, 2003
- “The Photography of the Night,” essay in The Architecture of the Night, Prestel Press, 2003
- “In the Camera’s Eye: The Woolworth Building, Alfred Stieglitz, and Avant-Garde Photography,” essay in Cass Gilbert, W. W. Norton, 2001
- “From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth-Century America”, University of California Press, 1999
courses
- Arch 181/182 and 581/582: Introductory Global Survey of Architectural History
- Arch 390/391: Survey of American Built Environment
- Arch 387: 19th-Century Cities: Tradition and Modernity
- Arch 398: Reel and Real New York: The City on Film; and Modernism in Translation from Europe to the United States
- Arch 690/680: Seminars on Off-Center Modernisms; Off the Wall and into the Landscape: Land Arts since the 1960s; Miami: The Magic City; The New Woman and the “New” New York; and Ph.D. Methods and Historiography
research
- Film and photography as mediators and interpreters of space and building (i.e., race and gender in skyscraper photography
- Georgia O’Keeffe’s cityscapes
- Photography of Havana and Mexico City by Walker Evans and Tina Modotti
- Critical practices in design and architectural education and profession (i.e., women architects in India and Sri Lanka
- Land artists since the 1960s
- Gordon Matta-Clark and New York City as urban wilderness
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