People

Co-Chair

Lawrence Chua is a historian of the modern built environment with an emphasis on the trans-regional histories of Asian architecture and urban cultures. He is the author of Bangkok Utopia: Modern Architecture and Buddhist Felicities, published in the University of Hawai’i Press’ Spatial Habitus series in 2021. His current research project examines the chronopolitics and temporal entanglements of modern architecture and the pre-modern built environment in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. It traces the crossed histories of the region’s architectural and epigraphical fragments from the pre-colonial past into the present to argue that although architectural modernity is typically narrated as a new conception of time rooted in the present, modernism in Southeast Asia was also oriented toward “medieval” and “classical” pasts. Another ongoing research project looks at the history of hip hop as a critique of the principles of architectural modernism. His writing has appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, October, the Journal of Urban History, Fabrications, the Journal of Architecture, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, and Southeast of Now. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and positions: asia critique. He is co-editor of the ArchAsia book series for Hong Kong University Press.

lachua@syr.edu

Co-Chair

Germán Pallares-Avitia is a registered Mexican architect and scholar. He holds a MArch from the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya and a PhD in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. His research lies at the intersection of modernization, cultural relations, borders and politics in the context of Latin America and the US. Germán’s work is interdisciplinary, drawing on fields such as border, Chicano and gender studies, as well as environmental history and urbanism and explores post-colonial and decolonial concepts that refine understandings of territories, nations, identity and migration as they relate to architectural and urban conditions.
 
Germán’s research project @the_postborderzone examines the built environment of the borderlands as a series of sites in which residents often exchange places and have daily access to cultural, social and commercial activities across political divides. These spaces are where hybridized citizenship arises as a result of the resistance to and assimilation of imperialistic, nation-state and capitalist determinants. Currently, Germán hosts the podcast @fromthemarginspodcast, an open forum for intersectional conversations on topics of marginalization and oppression with researchers, artists, designers and activists who transgress the limits of cultural production through resistance, justice and liberation.

gpallare@risd.edu

Charles Davis II - Associate Professor of Architectural History and Criticism, University of Texas at Austin

Maura Lucking - Assistant Professor of Architectural History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Charles Davis II - Assistant Professor of Architectural History and Criticism, University of Texas at Austin

Jesús Escobar - Associate Professor of Art History, Northwestern University

Melina Gooray - Northwestern University, Special Projects Fellow at the Colored Girl Museum in Philadelphia

Carol Lynne Horiuchi - Independent Scholar, Secretary of Society of Architectural Historians

Itohan Osayimwese - Associate Professor of Art History, Brown University