Our projects
She Writes Architecture 1750-1850
PD Dr Anne Hultzsch
Project leaderShe 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 fellowWomen 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.
Affective Encounters. German Women Mediating the Built Environment Around 1800
Elena Rieger
Doctoral fellowThis dissertation examines the writings of two German women around 1800, Emilie von Berlepsch (1755-1830) and Lucie Domeier (c. 1770-1836), to explore how they perceived, critiqued, and theorised the built environment through their lived experiences. It argues that their affective encounters, mediated through writing, constitute forms of architectural knowledge that have remained overlooked in architectural historiography.
In addition to the historical analysis, this dissertation develops a method of affective anecdotes that document deviations from the plan. They are protocols of disruption: intense moments of friction, failure, and bodily limitations that expose the fiction of the disembodied researcher, and question the conditions under which architectural historiography is produced. By bringing historical analysis and reflections on the research process into dialogue, the dissertation contributes to feminist architectural historiography by expanding what counts as architectural evidence and by proposing an embodied and affective approach to writing architectural history.
Image source: Johann Michael Rüdiger, Frontispiece, Frauen-Zim[m]er-Bibliotheckgen [...], Güstrau 1705