Our projects

She Writes Architecture 1750-1850

PD Dr Anne Hultzsch

Project leader 

She Writes Architecture is located across WoWA’s geographies and focuses on three genres: travel writing, historiography, and advice literature. The project's aim is to read these texts as spatial critiques, revealing the influence their authors wielded over spatial practices,  norms, and transgressions. Reading between continents and in the colonial contexts of the period, it complicates their gender with their class, race, and colonial privileges while centering their work within architectural and spatial histories.



Image source: Haywood, Eliza. The Female Spectator. Frontispiece. 1, 1744.

Women Making Space in South America 1700-1900

Dr Sol Pérez-Martínez

Postdoc fellow


Women Making Space in South America 1700-1900 examines the writings of women in Chile, Perú, Bolivia and Argentina during the 18th and 19th century to explore their spatial practices and their participation in constructing their country’s built environment. This postdoctoral project focuses on making visible women’s accounts of their involvement in three different urban sites: the street, the convent and the school, arguing that women ‘made space’ for themselves in the late colonial and early republican period in South America.


Image source: Garreaud, Pedro Emilio. La Zamacueca. 1875 1863. Photograph. A0007-000007. Cultura Digital UDP.

Situating the Frauen-Zimmer: Women’s Writings on, in, and outside of the Architectural Interior, 1783-1876

Elena Rieger 

Doctoral fellow


This dissertation will examine the writings of five authors: Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807), Emilie von Berlepsch (1755-1839), Lucie Domeier (1770-1796), Louise Mühlbach (1814-1873), Louise Otto-Peters (1819-1895). The project utilises the spatial dimension that the term Frauenzimmer (women’s room) offers—a body present in space–as a lens for exploring the writings of women and their architectural descriptions. This dissertation argues, that women’s situated descriptions of architecture offer a valuable perspective that challenges dominant narratives which have historically excluded and marginalized certain groups.


Image source: Johann Michael Rüdiger, Frontispiece, Frauen-Zim[m]er-Bibliotheckgen [...], Güstrau 1705