Itohan Osayimwese and Sean McPherson Appointed as Interim SAH Board Members

The Society of Architectural Historians has appointed two new SAH Board members to serve interim terms through April 2021: Itohan Osayimwese as interim secretary and Sean McPherson as interim board member. Osayimwese replaces Kathryn O’Rourke, who stepped down in June after serving as SAH secretary for four years. McPherson replaces board member Mark Hinchman, who was recently named co-editor of SAHARA and now serves as an ex officio member of the SAH Board.

L–R: Itohan Osayimwese and Sean McPherson

Itohan Osayimwese is associate professor of the history of art and architecture and an affiliate faculty member in Africana Studies and Urban Studies at Brown University. She has taught previously at Ithaca College and the College of William and Mary. She received her Ph.D. in architectural history from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, her M.Arch. from Rice University, and A.B. from Bryn Mawr College. Her research engages with theories of modernity, postcoloniality, and globalization to analyze modern architecture, the built environment, and visual cultures in nineteenth and twentieth-century Germany, East and West Africa, and the Caribbean. Her book, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), received a 2016 Society of Architectural Historians/Mellon Foundation award. She served as a board member of the Society from 2017 to 2020, and co-chaired the 2019 annual conference in Providence. She is the founding co-chair of the SAH Minority Scholars Affiliate Group.

Sean H. McPherson is associate professor of art history in the Department of Art & Art History at Bridgewater State University, where he teaches classes on Asian and global art and architectural history. After studying architectural design and Japanese timber-frame construction at the Nagoya Institute of Technology, in Nagoya, Japan, McPherson received his M.Arch and Ph.D. in architectural history from the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of research include the art and architecture of Japanese Shintō shrine festivals, the architecture of Japanese American Buddhism, Asian American cultural landscapes, and issues of equity and accessibility in higher education. He is the founding co-chair of the SAH Asian American and Diasporic Architectural History Affiliate Group.