Wesley Cornwell, PhD Candidate (English)
Pedagogies of Perception: Modern American Performance and the Professionalization of Lighting Design, 1925–1950
If modern theater makers — and those who study them — agree on anything, it’s that the advent of incandescent lighting fundamentally transformed the aesthetics of the modern American stage. Despite this widespread consensus, stage lighting remains remarkably underappreciated and understudied. Pedagogies of Perception fills this lacuna by tracing the emergence and professionalization of lighting design, theorizing how technological change conditions new forms of creative labor and aesthetic experience. Drawing on seldom-studied visual, schematic, and technical materials, including design renderings, light plots, cue sheets, focus charts, equipment inventories, and patent applications, I map the formal and informal networks of designers, technical directors, electricians, and engineers who created, standardized, circulated, taught, and learned techniques for and knowledge about theatrical lighting. In turn, I demonstrate how these emergent practices shaped the aesthetics and politics of modern performance, attending to questions of attentional control, perceptual and affective mediation, embodiment, and racialization. By placing lighting design at the center of American performance, I ultimately argue that design pedagogy, labor, and professionalization were constitutive of, rather than incidental to, the history of modern aesthetic experience.
Samuel Fox, PhD Candidate(Architecture)
Containing Religious Heterodoxy in the Falkland Islands/Malvinas, 1833–1893
Two prefabricated chapels were erected in the Falkland Islands/Malvinas in 1873, produced by Messrs. Boulton & Paul Ltd. of Norwich, England: a Presbyterian chapel in Darwin and a Catholic chapel in Stanley. Built at the colony's margins for Scottish shepherd-settlers and South American laborers, both stood in formal and material contrast to the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral, a brick monument of British proprietorship that would soon dominate the colony's waterfront. Despite their apparent material hierarchy, all three buildings shared a common industrial substrate: the same mass-produced fixtures from the same metropolitan supplier. That an administration whose legitimacy was partly forged by expelling Catholic precedent in 1833 would later permit, and partially fund, dissident worship makes these minor chapels’ British mass-produced provenance paradoxical—especially as Argentina simultaneously invoked the archipelago's Catholic antecedents as territorial evidence against British occupation. Maybe this shared substrate was just a byproduct of disinterested industrial production; potentially even a demonstration of strategic Liberal tolerance. Or, perhaps more calculated, a containment of unorthodox faiths whose naturalization to the land might jeopardize British sovereignty. Understanding what these chapels aimed to settle—be it land, sovereignty, people, faiths, or capital—could benefit from treating the materials they employed as an entry point, whether exposed or concealed. The fellowship will fund research on these buildings at the Jane Cameron National Archives, the only repository where such granular information concerning the archipelago’s British colonial history is held.
Diana Guo, PhD Candidate (Urban Planning)
Land as Archive: Reserve Lands and Settler Colonial Urbanism in Vancouver, Canada
This project examines how Indigenous practices and modes of life in Vancouver are absorbed into urban design and architectural projects that appear sensitive to histories of land dispossession, yet reproduce settler logics of development. I trace how key terms like reconciliation planning, "collaboration," and "partnership" are being mobilized by architects, planners, and municipalities in the reconfiguration of urban parks. In Vancouver, contemporary Indigenous housing developments continue earlier park logics by translating ancestral lands into picturesque landscapes and inserting them into real estate markets. Archival research focuses on park history in British Columbia from the 1880s to 1910s, when Vancouver's settler landscape was consolidated through lands held "in common": Indigenous reserves, Crown lands, and public parks. I examine three categories of materials: (1) coastal surveys and maps showing how foreshore and Indigenous village sites were rendered "vacant" and open to improvement; (2) land regulation and urban design documents that reshaped soils and water regimes to support settlement; and (3) photographs and renderings as technologies that naturalize settler presence.
James Heard, PhD Candidate (Architecture)
Professional Revolutionaries: Architects and the Communist Party of the USA in California during the Mid-Twentieth Century
Although the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians (FAECT), the largest architects’ union during the twentieth century in the United States, had a more pronounced presence on the East Coast, it also functioned as a valuable network for West Coast architects engaged in communist political activism. Despite formal blacklists never being used in the profession of architecture, informal anti-communist policies were prevalent. As state-sponsored surveillance of alleged subversive activity intensified following the second World War, Communist architects on the West Coast were subject to political reprisal. Those who had established careers—Gregory Ain and Garrett Eckbo—suffered through the 1950s in professional practice before taking academic positions in the early 1960s. Other West Coast Communist architects—David Hyun, Zelma Wilson, and Josef Van der Kar—found themselves in exile. As a result of this repression, no archive for the Professional Section of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) exists and nearly all architects in the orbit of the Party destroyed evidence of their participation. This research seeks to retrace the political networks found in the personal archives of these architects to reconstitute the relationships between architects who were involved in the CPUSA and FAECT on both the West and East Coast.
Pujan Karambeigi, PhD Candidate (Art History)
Persepolis as Preservation Infrastructure: Architecture, Tourism, and the Image of Heritage in 1960s Iran
This project examines the preservation of Persepolis in the 1960s as a case study in the international circulation of conservation techniques. It asks how the site’s terraces, reliefs, photographic records, and conservation problems were translated into a modern technical language of preservation. Drawing on UNESCO, ICCROM, Iranian cultural agencies, and Italian preservation experts, the project analyzes how Persepolis was transformed into a managed architectural landscape: a site to be stabilized, documented, visited, photographed, and presented to national and international publics.
The project argues that preservation functioned as a comparative infrastructure. It created procedures through which distant sites could be measured and narrated according to shared technical standards. Persepolis is especially revealing because it shows what happened when methods developed largely in relation to Mediterranean antiquity were brought to bear on an Iranian imperial site. The project examines how condition photographs, photogrammetry, before-and-after records, and technical images authorized intervention while helping Persepolis circulate as a tourist destination and symbol of Iranian antiquity. In doing so, it asks how the category of heritage is assembled.
Lasse Rau, PhD Candidate (Architecture)
A Rural “Desert”: Aesthetics, Energy, and Historical Form in France, 1960-1981
Interest in rural architecture in the two decades after 1960 moved beyond its previous use as a critique of functionalism. This dissertation studies how architects, planners, and parastatal organizations in France in the 1970s and 1980s intervened in areas that remained largely agrarian, with projects that rendered aesthetic the country’s economy. The design of nuclear power plants, archaeological museums, exhibitions, agricultural infrastructures, and natural parks echoed competing time scales: the end of abundance, a search for primitive origins, and the ecological cycles of agrarianism. Among these projects, some punctuated the countryside with futuristic sculptural forms; others outlined the boundaries of vast natural parks to be protected and experienced; and others experimented with traditional materials and technologies echoing a peasant past. This aesthetic surplus gave form to the countryside as it was being constructed by the intellectual debates between structural anthropologists and historians, the economic transition from central locational planning to decentralized market control, the political rupture of decolonization, the material changes explored by archaeologists and engineers, and the environmental concerns for preservation. Aesthetic theories of rural nature updated France’s conception of resources into environmental, energetic, and historical terms.
Maya Wilson-Sanchez, PhD Candidate (Art History)
Molding the Americas: Replication and Artistic Continuity
My dissertation develops a theory of replication and its contemporary reimaginings in the context of pre-Columbian art and archaeology. I research processes of replication using molds within discussions of labor, the movement of pre-colonial artworks, the collection of these belongings, and their exhibition. My argument is that the creation of replicas of pre-Columbian art serves as a method of cultural self-preservation and participation in a colonial economy. Ceramic molds started being used in the Americas in what is now coastal Ecuador between 1300 and 300 B.C.E. by the artists of the Chorrera culture. Since then, molding as a method for creating and reproducing objects spread north and south. By the time of the colonial invasion, it was a common technique. During the nascent stages of pre-Columbian archaeology in the 19th century, molding in plaster and paper was also common as an alternative to transporting monumental ancient sculptures from the Americas to universities, museums, and private collections abroad. My research explores how molding shaped artistic production in the Americas, both by analyzing how this technique was used by pre-colonial artists and by their contemporary descendants, and by examining its role in shaping pre-Columbian archaeology.
