Speakers

(In alphabetical order)

Sheila CRANE , University of Virginia, Architectural History (panel 2)
Sheila Crane joined the Department of Architectural History at the University of Virginia as an Assistant Professor in fall semester 2007. Professor Crane came to U.Va. from the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on architecture, visual cultures, and urban histories of modern Europe and the Mediterranean Basin, with a particular interest in France and North Africa. She is currently completing a book entitled Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and the Remaking of Modern Architecture that examines how architects and urban planners, photographers and theorists, archaeologists and preservationists mythologized their perceptions of Marseille and how their encounters with the city challenged existing representational tools and conceptual strategies.

Crane’s recent work has appeared in Future Anterior, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, as well as in collected volumes including Gender and Landscape (Routledge, 2005) and Cities: Space, Society, History (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). She has recently been a Visiting Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal where she began work on a second book project that analyzes movements of architects, transnational transfers of architectural ideas, and translations of built forms and meanings between Algiers and Marseille during the long process of decolonization from the 1930s through the 1980s.

Sarah HERDA , Graham Foundation for the Art, Director (panel 3)
The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago is pleased to announce that Sarah Herda will be the new Director of the Foundation as of July 2006. Herda has been the Executive Director/Curator of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City for the last eight years. While in that position she mounted over forty diverse exhibitions, working closely with architects, artists, and designers on material to be presented to the general public as well as more specialized audiences. Herda is also active in the design community and serves on numerous advisory boards and review panels related to the design field. Prior to joining Storefront for Art and Architecture she was the Director of Marketing and Sales for the Monacelli Press in New York, Director of the Center for Critical Architecture/Art and Exhibition Space in San Francisco, and an Associate Editor of William Stout Publishers in San Francisco.

Abidin KUSNO , University of British Columbia, Urban Affairs (panel 2)

Abidin Kusno is an associate professor at the Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia. He wrote Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia (Routledge, 2000) and articles on urban memories in the post-Suharto Indonesia.

Ruth ROGASKI , Vanderbilt University, Chinese History (panel 2)
Ruth Rogaski teaches courses in the history of modern China. She also has teaching and research interests in the history of medicine, the history of science, and gender history. She has written essays on a variety of topics including orphanages, germ warfare, and martial arts. Her book-length works include Hygienic Modernity (2004), a study of changing concepts of health and hygiene in nineteenth and twentieth century China, and a second work in progress, The Nature of Manchuria, about the role of the biological sciences in the formation of Asian empires.

J. Phillip THOMPSON , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Urban Planning (panel 3)
Phil Thompson is an urban planner and political scientist. He is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at MIT. He received a B.A. in Sociology from Harvard University in 1977, a M.U.P. from Hunter College in 1986, and a PhD. in Political Science from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1990. Phil worked as Deputy General Manager of the New York Housing Authority, and as Director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing Coordination. Phil is a frequent advisor to trade unions in their efforts to work with immigrant and community groups across the United States. Phil’s most recent academic work includes a 2004 review of public health interventions in poor black communities (written with Arline Geronimus) published in the Du Bois Review entitled “To Denigrate, Ignore, or Disrupt: The Health Impact of Policy-induced Breakdown of Urban African American Communities of Support,” an article entitled “Judging Mayors” in the June, 2005 issue of Perspectives on Politics, and a recent book called Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities and the Struggle for Deep Democracy published in 2006 by Oxford University Press. Since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, Phil has worked with the AFL-CIO Investment Trust Corporation and with local community groups to create affordable housing and workforce development initiatives to help rebuild the city of New Orleans. He is also coordinating MIT sponsored projects in New Orleans including work on economic development, planning, and the design of an urban information system to help guide recovery efforts.

Sudhir VENKATESH , Columbia University, Sociology and the Center for Urban Research and Policy (workshop)
Sudhir Venkatesh's research is rooted in ethnographic investigation of urban neighborhoods in the United States (New York, Chicago) and Paris, France. His most recent book is Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Harvard University Press, 2006), an ethnographic study of illegal economies in Chicago. Off the Books received the C. Wright Mills Award (2007) and a Best Book Award from Slate.Com (2006). His first book, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (2000), explored the social organization, moral universe, and history of a Chicago housing development, The Robert Taylor Homes. His forthcoming book, Gang Leader for a Day, is a reported memoir (Penguin Press, 2008). He is also the co-editor of Youth, Globalization and the Law (Stanford University Press 2006) and Director of the Youth and Globalization Collaborative Research Network at the Social Science Research Council. He is currently completing a long-term project on sex work in New York and Chicago with the economist Steven Levitt.

Other ongoing research projects include a study of immigration and settlement in the suburbs of Paris, an in-depth study of re-entry among the formerly incarcerated in New York, and a ten-year documentation of transformation of public housing in Chicago. His documentary film "Dislocation," follows families as they relocate from condemned public housing developments. The documentary aired on PBS in 2005, and more information can be found at www.dislocationfilm.com.
Venkatesh received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago. He was a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University from 1996-1999. He is currently Director of the Center for Urban Research and Policy, and Director of the Charles H. Revson Fellowship Program

Annabel Jane WHARTON , Duke University, Late Ancient and Byzantine Art History (panel 1)
Annabel Wharton, the William B. Hamilton Professor of Art History, has focused her work on Late Antique and Byzantine art and culture, but she has also investigated the effect of modernity on the medieval past and its landscapes, first in her study of the first generation of Hilton International Hotels (Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture, University of Chicago Press, 2001) and most recently in a book titled Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replics, Themeparks, University of Chicago Press, 2006. She is beginning work on a new project considering the modern recycling of pre-modern buildings. This study will document the physical, economic and political implications of contemporary appropriations of architecture and history.

Louise YOUNG , University of Wisconsin Madison, Japanese Modern History (panel 1)
Louise Young is Professor of Japanese History and Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Her research interests include World War Two in Asia, comparative imperialism, and most recently, local history and urbanization.  Her book, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (UC Press, 1998), won the Arisawa and Fairbank prizes.  Other publications include “Ideologies of Difference and the Turn to Atrocity: Japan’s War on China,” in A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937-1945, (Cambridge U. Press, 2005); “Japan at War: History-writing on the Crisis of the 1930s,” in The Origins of the Second World War, Reconsidered, (Routledge, 1999); and “Marketing the Modern: Department Stores, Consumer Culture, and the New Middle Class in Interwar Japan.” International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 55 (Spring 1999).  She is currently working on a study of the social and cultural history of modern Japanese urbanism.

Rebecca ZURIER , University of Michigan, American Art and Architectural History  (panel 1)
Rebecca Zurier is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department and Faculty Associate for the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan.  She studies what American art and culture can tell us about each other, defining art broadly to include comic strips, mass media, vernacular architecture, and other aspects of the visual and built environment. Her research has focussed to date on the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, a time when industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and changes in race relations and social mores--as well as experimentation in politics and the arts--redefined the United States as modern. Current interests include urban culture in New York and Detroit, national identity and the perception of American art abroad, and concepts of realism and representation in art and writing. 

She is the author of Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (University of California Press, 2006) which won the Smithsonian's Charles Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Publication in American art history and the book award for art from the New York Society Library; author and co-curator (with Robert W. Snyder and Virginia Mecklenburg) of Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and their New York, an exhibition held at the National Museum of American Art and New-York Historical Society whose catalogue (W. W. Norton, 1995) won the College Art Association's Alfred Barr award for distinguished museum publication; author and curator of Art for The Masses: A Radical Magazine and its Graphics (Temple University Press 1988, based on the catalogue of the exhibition held at the Yale University Art Gallery and elsewhere in 1984-85; The American Firehouse: An Architectural and Social History (Abbeville Press, 1982).