Five SAH Members received American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships this year.
ACLS Fellowship Program 2013
Assistant Professor
Department: School of Architecture
Florida Atlantic University
Building Between Empires: Yugoslav Architecture in the Cold War Networks
The project explores the international exchange of architectural culture in the Cold War by focusing on socialist Yugoslavia, an unusual place that experienced both Sovietization and Americanization before settling in between as a leader of the non-aligned world. It examines Yugoslavia as a conduit of cultural transfer between the First, Second, and Third Worlds and analyzes how architectural representations typically associated with high modernism and postmodernism were persistently transformed and reassigned new meanings. It proposes that Yugoslavia participated in an alternative globalization, different from both the American and Soviet global projects, and that architecture opens a uniquely comprehensive view of the cultural, ideological, technological, and economic aspects of that process.
ACLS Fellowship Program 2013
Professor
Department: Landscape Architecture
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Shajar al-Durr: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of a 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen
Shajar al-Durr of thirteenth century Egypt was a rare case of a woman ruler, and her distinctive architectural patronage changed the face of Cairo and had a lasting impact on Islamic architecture. Rising from slave origins, Shajar al-Durr became concubine, wife, and regent for the Ayyubid Sultan Salih, and ultimately was appointed as the legitimate ruler after his untimely death. In architectural history, her patronage was innovative because of the tombs that she added to his madrasa (theological college) and her own, thereby transforming those institutions into commemorative monuments. For the first time, an architectural complex was empowered to stand for the founder himself, visibly and unforgettably manifest in the tomb’s high dome, rising above the urban skyline.
ACLS New Faculty Fellows Program 2013
Ph.D., Architecture, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Dissertation: "The Spatialization of Knowledge and Power at the Astronomical Observatories of Sawai Jai Singh II, c. 1721-1743 CE"
Appointed in Art at University of Virginia (Academic Years 2013-2014 and 2014-2015)
Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowships in American Art 2013
Doctoral Candidate
Department: Art Department
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Sumptuous and Beautiful, As They Were: Architectural Form, Everyday Life, and Cultural Encounter in a Seventeenth-Century New Mexico Mission
This dissertation explores the material expressions of intercultural exchange in seventeenth-century New Mexico, focusing on the Purísima Concepción mission of Hawikuh Pueblo as a case study of architectural meaning in everyday life of the colonial American southwest. The Purísima Concepción was an arena of cultural encounter in which architecture and material culture accommodated interactions between the Franciscan missionaries and pueblo residents. This research project incorporates a detailed analysis of Hawikuh’s unpublished mission artifacts, a contextualization of the architectural form of the mission itself, and a critical rereading of primary documents to support an interpretation of the underlying metaphors that took material form as the Purísima Concepción mission.
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