Design: Morcos Key
Making and Unmaking Property: A Public Symposium
Organized by Buell Fellows Sonali Dhanpal and Chelsea Spencer
Friday, March 13, 2026
Architecture inscribes and reinscribes property regimes onto the surface of the earth. As tools of improvement and demarcation, buildings materialize otherwise abstract claims of property ownership. And in so doing, architecture also inaugurates the possibility of property destruction.
This symposium asks how property is made and unmade—not just through legal instruments or physical acts of seizure but also, crucially, through architectural objects and processes. It will bring together architectural historians with scholars of racial capitalism, colonialism, and law to illuminate new questions about how architecture and property are co-constituted across symbolic, social, spatial, and material registers. Presenters will address property’s making in actuarial assessment, hereditary compacts, domicile law, and the sedimentation of legal claims and property’s unmaking in sabotage, arson, and other acts of destruction.
Schedule
12:00 pm
Welcome by Lucia Allais (Buell & GSAPP)
Introduction by Sonali Dhanpal and Chelsea Spencer (Buell & SoF/Heyman)
12:15 pm - Session 1
Bhavani Raman (U Toronto), “A Patriarchal Compact: Preventive Detention and the Making of Caste and Property in Early Colonial India”
Lisa Haber-Thomson (Mt Holyoke), “Castle Doctrine and Exclusion in American Property Law”
Heba Alnajada (BU), “Material Afterlives of Islamic and Ottoman Property in Palestinian Refugee Camps”Response by Sonali Dhanpal
2:15 pm - Break
2:45 pm - Session 2
Bryan E. Norwood (UT Austin), “Measuring Risk: The Labor of Fire Insurance in the Early United States”
R.H. Lossin (Harvard Law), “1919 and the Triumph of Private Property”
Bench Ansfield (Temple), “Embers of Capital: To Burn a Fireproof Building in the 1970s Bronx”
Response by Chelsea Spencer
4:45 pm - Concluding Remarks by Kalyani Ramnath (Columbia)
Speakers
Heba Alnajada is an architectural historian and assistant professor at the History of Art and Architecture Department at Boston University. Her research interests include refugee histories, cities, the history of the modern Arab world, Islamic studies, and (increasingly) property, law, and borders. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Sedimentary Refuge: Islamic Hijra and Refugee Camps in Amman.
Bench Ansfield is an assistant professor of history at Temple University and the author of Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City (W. W. Norton, 2025), which was named a best book of the year by the New York Times and Kirkus Reviews. They hold a PhD in American Studies from Yale University.
Lisa Haber-Thomson is a historian whose research addresses the spaces of law, with a focus on colonial and postcolonial state practices across the Atlantic world from the eighteenth century to the present. She is currently at work on a book manuscript about carceral architectures across England and its expanding empire. A second major project investigates the historical relationships between architecture and property law. Lisa is assistant professor of architectural history at Mount Holyoke College.
R. H. Lossin writes about labor history, American radicalism, and contemporary art. They are associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and the Executive Director of the Program on Law and Political Economy at Harvard Law School. Their first book, Sabotage: The Rise and Fall of a Revolutionary Idea, is under contract with Princeton University Press.
Bryan E. Norwood, PhD, is an architectural historian and an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on architecture and building practices in the United States and Atlantic World in the long nineteenth century. His first book Architectural Pursuits: Capitalism, Morality, and the Formation of an American Profession is forthcoming with Columbia University Press.
Bhavani Raman is an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Document Raj: Scribes and Writing in Early Colonial India (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and has authored essays on colonial property and recordkeeping practices. She is currently completing a book on the jurisprudence of rebellion in early colonial South Asia.
