Symposium & Book Launch
WE WRITE: Finissage of Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900
Date: Thursday, 7 May 2026, 13.00-20.00
Location: ETH Zürich, Campus Hönggerberg
HIL E67 (Rote Hölle) and HIL D 50.5, gta Foyer
Stephano-Franscini-Platz 5, Zürich
Programme:
13.00 Exhibition Tour with Anne Hultzsch, Sol Pérez Martínez, and Elena Rieger
14.00 Feminist Translations in Architecture: Stéphanie Dadour, Émilie Oléron Evans, and Lucía Pérez Moreno
15.00 Coffee
15.30 Expanding Agency – Preliminary Research Results: Kathleen James-Chakraborty
16.15 Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900 – Wrapping Up: Anne Hultzsch
17.00 Lives and Afterlives of Collaborative Research Projects with Maarten Delbeke, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Anne Hultzsch
18.00 Book launch with Anne Hultzsch, Sol Pérez Martínez, and Moritz Gleich. Responses by Kathleen James-Chakraborty and Adrian Forty
18.30 Apéro
Abstracts & Speaker Bios
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
Expanding Agency: Preliminary Research Results
Funded through a European Research Council Advanced Grant, the project Expanding Agency: Women, Race, and the Dissemination of Modern Architecture, explores many of the same themes as Anne Hultzsch’s Women Writing Architecture, although it focuses on a later period. This report of its results to date includes a discussion of what can be learned from focusing on twentieth-century periodicals written by and for women. It will also address the project’s inclusion of African American women, the challenges of writing global histories, and a summary of the project's forthcoming edited collection Minding Her Business: Women, Architecture, and Design, as well as a discussion of our dissemination strategies, which include a poster exhibition as well as peer-reviewed scholarship.
Kathleen James-Chakraborty is Professor of Art history at University College Dublin.
Educated at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, she has also Botaught at the University of Minnesota, the University of California Berkeley, the Ruhr University Bochum, and the Yale School of Architecture, where she was the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History. Her books include Modernism as Memory: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany (Minnesota, 2018), The Belgian Friendship Building: From the New York World’s Fair to a Virginia HBCU (Virginia, 2025), co-authored with Katherine M. Kuenzli and Bryan Clark Green, and Minding Her Business: Women, Architecture, and Design, co-edited with Alborz Dianat.
Stéphanie Dadour is Associate Professor at ENSA Paris-Malaquais and co-founder of the architecture firm Dadour de Pous Architecture. Her teaching, research, and projects focus on the links between domestic space and spatial strategies of minority groups. Among her publications are Des voix s’élèvent. Féminismes et Architecture; The Housing Project. Discourses, Ideals, Models and Politics in 20th-Century Exhibitions (with G. Caramellino); and 1989, hors-champ de l’architecture officielle : Liban. She is currently completing a body of work centered on the notion of Encounter in architecture.
Dr Émilie Oléron Evans is an art historian and translator based at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on the respective and combined roles of gender dynamics and of translation in the conceptualisation and institutional evolution of history of art, architecture and design as disciplines. She wrote on the reception and legacy of, among others, Nikolaus Pevsner, Linda Nochlin and Carol Duncan. She is co-investigator on the project ‘Women and History of Art in the Making, Britain, 1945-1974’, which proposes new approaches for documenting and interpreting the archival traces of women’s professional agency in the spaces shaping visual literacy.
Dr. Lucía C. Pérez-Moreno is a Professor of History of Architecture at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She has served as a Visiting Professor at KU Leuven (Belgium) from 2022 to 2024 and at the University of Colorado Denver (USA) in 2016. She holds a PhD in Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (2013), an MS.AAD from Columbia University (New York, 2008), and completed postgraduate studies at Aalto University (Helsinki, 2004). A licensed architect and urban planner (University of Navarra, 2003), she also holds a BA in Philosophy from KU Leuven (2024). Her research focuses on the intersection of architecture and feminist theory. She has served as the Principal Investigator (PI) for several research grants dedicated to studying the work of women architects in Spain and has published widely on the subject, including: Women in a Spain in Transition, 1962–1999 (ed., 2025) and Architecture & Feminist Critical Theory: Selected Writings by Hilde Heynen (ed., 2025). She is currently working on the translation of these two volumes: the former from Spanish into English, and the latter from English into Spanish.