Events

Current & Upcoming Events

Past Events

Members Virtual ‘Coffee Hour’

Wednesday 10/06/21 at 11am PST/ 2pm EST.

Register here.

We’ll plan to share a little bit about our recent programs and plans for the upcoming academic year as well as talk a bit more about our hopes and expectations for the three elected positions outlined below. If you have an interest in running, please reach out and send us a note in advance but know that there will be time to finalize your decision and put together a short position statement following this meeting.

All are welcome to join but we particularly welcome new members, junior faculty and graduate students, and those with ideas for the AG and/or an interest in getting more involved in its leadership.

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Officer Elections

To be held online in late October 2021

If you have an interest in any of the below roles, please reach out to the Co-Chairs (cldavis@buffalo.edu and maura.lucking@ucla.edu) with your CV and a short statement of interest by 10/10/21

Roles:

Director of Collaborative Programming: The Director of Collaborative Programming works with the Co-Chairs in building partnerships with like-minded professional organizations and representing the group outside of SAH whenever necessary. An ideal candidate for this position is a faculty member or graduate student who is knowledgeable and/or interested in learning about the institutional structure and mission of SAH, has fostered or is interested in fostering professional or academic networks with like-minded professional organizations, and has experience in collaborating with architects, preservationists, historians, and humanist scholars.

Web & Digital Content Officer: he Web & Digital Content Officer is responsible for developing and maintaining the online presence of the affiliate group on its website, listserv, social media and partner websites. We currently maintain a digital presence on Humanities Commons, via our own website and in collaboration with the Society of Architectural Historians for soliciting work for annual roundtables and events. This officer will also be in charge of developing a routine for hosting virtual (and later in-person) happy hours with new and continuing members to maintain social relationships within the affiliate group.

Development Liaison: The Development Liaison is responsible for pursuing funding opportunities and providing semi-annual reports on the financial health of the organization. An ideal candidate for this position is someone who has experience working with annual budgets and fundraising and/or has an active interest in learning about these responsibilities.

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SAH Connects | (Summer 2021)

Race and the Historiography of American Architecture Roundtable

This program can now be viewed online here.

This program will examine the role of race in the historiography of “American architecture” during the long nineteenth century. Surveys of American architecture have optimistically, and perhaps anachronistically, interpreted national architectural movements through the lens of an inclusive democratic liberalism that embraced and collected the material cultures of people of all colors, nationalities, and religious creeds. Yet the first century and a half of American history was characterized by stark debates about the racial and ethnic composition of the new nation state and its citizens. Claims to ‘Americanness,’ called into stark relief by the profound violence of the Civil War, were highly contested, exerting a direct influence on both the body politic and its perception of material culture.

Across historical periods and architectural movements, the appropriation and adaptation of building forms and styles gave rise to nationalist and regionalist ideologies with diverse political aims. The purpose of this program is to consider revisionist histories of American architecture that subvert the synthetic narrative of “a nation of immigrants” or a “melting pot,” to recover the competing debates that have been lost to time due to a hegemonic narrative of the past. If we are to construct a new portrait of American architecture, we must bring canonical and vernacular histories together in a contrapuntal narrative of the formative nineteenth century, paying special attention to the histories of those written out of canonical surveys. We propose that the history of the nineteenth century is not yet exhausted, but needs to be re-envisioned and told anew through the critical lenses that enable us to examine the limits and lost projects of American liberalism.

Our roundtable will be divided into two complementary parts: an introductory presentation that outlines the limits of existing scholarship, and a panel of respondents who will discuss the key conceptual rubrics, theoretical lenses, and potential case studies that begin to limn the basis of a new history of American architecture. We will close with a public conversation on the understudied or ignored material cultures that might present grounds for alternative histories of American architecture in the nineteenth-century.

Opening Presentations from the Editors:

Charles Davis, University at Buffalo, USA

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Victoria University of Wellington,

New Zealand

Kathryn Holliday, University of Texas at Arlington, USA

Respondent Panel :

Bryan Norwood, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Joseph Watson, Kansas State University, USA

Kathryn O’Rourke, Trinity College, USA 

Tara Dudley, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Summer Sutton, Ryerson University, Canada