Reading Her:
Introducing Women Writing Architecture c.1800

Date: Thursday, 8 September 2022
Location: Zoom https://bit.ly/ercwowa
Password: WOWA
Time: 18.00-19.00

As part of the second WoWA* Event, we are inviting 9 researchers to introduce a Woman Writing Architecture between 1700 and 1900. Reading Her presents 9 short portraits of women and their writings that we conceive as relevant to architectural histories.

Join us for an hour of inspiration to expand our references, influences, and reading lists. Each woman will be introduced with one image, one quote, one publication, and one architectural topic, widely conceived.

Who are you reading this summer?

Share your #wowa at @ercwowa via twitter and instagram. 

Mary Louise Pratt

Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor, Emerita, of Spanish and Portuguese and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, Emerita, at Stanford University. She holds degrees in comparative literature and linguistics from the University of Toronto, the University of Illinois, and Stanford University. She has published extensively on the subjects of Latin American women's writing; travel literature and imperialism; language and militarization; and modernity and neoliberalism. Her ground-breaking Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992, 2007) and her concept of "the contact zone", has reoriented the thinking about cultural encounters in the Americas and beyond. Her most recent book, Planetary Longings, appeared in  2022 with Duke University Press.

Barbara Penner

Barbara Penner is Professor in Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She is author of Bathroom (2013), awarded the 2014 RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding University-Located Research, and has co-edited numerous books on gender, space, and architecture. She is a contributing editor of Places Journal and is currently on a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2021-22).

Richard Wittman

Richard Wittman teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he specializes in European architecture and theory of the 18th and 19th centuries. He is the author of Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (Routledge, 2007; French translation 2019) and the forthcoming San Paolo fuori le mura: Architecture and Catholic Revival in the Nineteenth Century (English ed. Cambridge University Press; Italian ed. Viella; both 2023).

Hollyamber Kennedy

Dr. Kennedy previously held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Harvard University, at the Mahindra Humanities Center, as part of a Mellon Foundation project on Migration and the Humanities. Her research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Social Science Research Council, The Max Planck Kunsthistorisches Institute, The Forum for Transregional Studies, the DAAD and the SAH. Her writing has been published by numerous journals including Grey Room, Arch +, Avery Review, and the Journal of Architecture, and by the University of Chicago Press, MIT Press, Whitechapel Gallery, and the EPFL Press, among others. In addition to her current book manuscript, Dr. Kennedy is working on a long-term collaborative project with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi exploring new concept histories of settlement at the cross section of migration and colonial modernities. She received her PhD in Architectural History and Theory from Columbia University.

Nitin Bathla

Nitin Bathla is a researcher and filmmaker, who works as a lecturer and doctoral programme coordinator at the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies at ETH Zurich. He focuses on mobilising socially-engaged art and filmmaking for landscape and urban change through working alongside social collectives and communities on the ground in India, Italy, and Switzerland. Nitin’s 2020 award-winning film Not Just Roads co-directed with Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou looks at the adverse social and environmental impacts triggered by rapid highway urbanisation in India through focusing on the fragments of everyday life of communities it displaces.

Damla Göre

Damla Göre is a phD fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at the Chair of Prof. Maarten Delbeke. She studied architecture at Middle East Technical University (METU) and obtained her master’s degree (MA) from Istanbul Bilgi University. Her doctoral thesis traces the notion of the salon from its decorative to broader social meanings and examines it as a psycho-spatially contested phenomenon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ottoman art and architecture. Her research interests lie in the cross-sections of domestic architecture, material culture and gender studies in the context of Mediterranean geography.

Niloofar Rasooli

Niloofar Rasooli is a first-year doctorate fellow in the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, gta, ETH Zürich. Her doctoral research, Transgressing The Forbidden: Gender Boundaries and Their Counter-Narratives in Iran (1848–1936), investigates women's criticism and resistance, as well as their critical imagination, against the disciplined built environment of pre-modern Iran. Niloofar holds a Masters degree in Studies of Architecture in Iran (2018), and prior to joining gta, she worked as a journalist, editor, and essayist in Tehran, contributing to a variety of political and architectural journals and newspapers, focusing on women's conflicts, stories, and resistance.

Sol Perez-Martinez

Sol Pérez-Martínez, is an architect, educator and postdoctoral fellow at the Group Hultzsch (gta-ETH Zürich) in the project ‘Women Writing Architecture’. Her current research titled ‘Latin Women Making Space 1700-1900’ focuses on the experiences of South American women writing about architecture and the built environment during the 18th and 19th centuries. Sol is a qualified architect in Chile, with master degrees in architecture and architectural history, and a PhD in Architecture & Education from The Bartlett and the Institute of Education, UCL. Sol has presented her work internationally, including at the Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Exchange, Central Saint Martins and Nottingham Contemporary.

Elena Rieger

Elena Rieger is an Art Historian and PhD research fellow at the Group Hultzsch (gta-ETH) in the project ‘Women Writing Architecture’. Her PhD is about Unpacking the Frauen-Zimmer: German-language Female Travelogues on, in and outside of the Architectural Interior, 1700-1900. Elena studied Art History and Archaeological Sciences at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Università degli Studi di Udine and at the Technische Universität Dresden. After her studies, she worked as a coordinator and research assistant at the Archiv der Avantgarden and the Albertinum, two museums of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. In addition, she worked as a curator at the Stephanie Kelly Gallery in Dresden.