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, 1787-1804

Elena Rieger 

Doctoral fellow


This dissertation examines the writings of Emilie von Berlepsch (1755-1830) and Lucie Domeier (1770?-1836), analysing how they perceived, critiqued, and theorised the built environment from their lived experience.

I focus on their embodied encounters, while also retracing their steps and re-enacting their writings on-site, merging their voices with mine and pulling these spaces from the past into the present. Grounded in feminist theory, this methodology weaves personal anecdotes, ‘affective encounters’, with historical and theoretical analysis, bridging different temporalities and ways of writing architectural histories. Rather than celebrating Berlepsch and Domeier as pioneering or exceptional figures, this dissertation interrogates the complexities and tensions within their perspectives and their writing.


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