SAH Announces Incoming Board Members for 2022

The Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to announce the following incoming board members for 2022:

Second Vice President: Mohammad Gharipour, Morgan State University
Board Member: Elisa Dainese, Georgia Institute of Technology
Board Member: Catherine Rose Ettinger, Universidad Michoacana San Nicolas de Hidalgo
Board Member: Ashley Gardini, Diablo Valley College
Board Member: Eric Paul Mumford, University of Washington in Saint Louis
Board Member: Jason Nguyen, University of Toronto
Interim Board Member: Vimalin Rujivacharakul, University of Delaware

They will be joining current Officers of SAH who will be continuing for a second one-year second term or moving to a new position: 

President: Patricia Morton, University of California, Riverside
First Vice President: Carla Yanni, Rutgers University
Treasurer: Roberta Washington, Roberta Washington Architects
Secretary: Lynne Horiuchi, Independent Scholar

The Annual Business Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians will be held at The Westin Pittsburgh on Wednesday, April 27, 2022, from 6:00–6:45 p.m., and will include the election of officers and directors to the SAH Board. The nominated directors will succeed those whose terms expire at the end of the conference. Proxy ballots will be sent via email to SAH members.

Mohammad Gharipour, Morgan State University

Mohammad Gharipour is Professor and Chair of the Department of Built Environment Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, USA. He obtained his PhD in architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses and design studios at six universities, including Maryland Institute College of Art, Kennesaw State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and National University of Singapore. Dr. Gharipour has received prestigious awards and grants from several organizations including the Society of Architectural Historians, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright-Hays, Foundation for Landscape Studies, Council of Educators of Landscape Architecture, American Institute of Architects, Fulbright, Memorial 

Foundation for Jewish Culture, and National Institute of Health. In addition to organizing and chairing more than 30 panels and conferences and publishing more than 140 papers, 

encyclopedia entries, and reviews, he has authored, edited, and co-edited 13 books including Persian Gardens and Pavilions (I.B. Tauris, 2013), Synagogues in the Islamic World (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and Health and Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2021). Dr. Gharipour is the director and founding editor of the award-winning International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA) and the co-founder of the Epidemic Urbanism Initiative.

Elisa Dainese, Georgia Institute of Technology

Elisa Dainese is a historian and theorist with an architectural background and is currently Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her work specializes in African modernism with a focus on knowledge production and the cross-cultural exchange between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Her research and teaching examine twentieth- and twenty-first century architecture; non-western modernisms and Indigenous cultures; postcolonial theories, decolonial practices, and questions of race, gender and power in the design disciplines. She holds a PhD from the IUAV, in Italy. She has published widely in architectural books and magazines including the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, JA, e-flux, Thresholds and Bauhaus, and her research has received grants and awards from Columbia University, 

Bruno Zevi Foundation, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC), the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the University of Pisa, and Georgia Tech. Dr. Dainese’s book projects include two manuscripts entitled War Diaries: Design after the Destruction of Art and Architecture (co-editor, University of Virginia Press, 2022) and African Dimensions of Postwar Architecture (author, forthcoming).

Catherine Rose Ettinger, Universidad Michoacana San Nicolas de Hidalgo

Catherine Rose Ettinger was trained as an architect and holds a master’s degree in historic preservation and a doctorate in architecture from the UNAM (2001). Her interests in research revolve around the complex relationship between tradition and modernity, and she has published on both vernacular and modern architecture in Mexico with several edited volumes on Mexican modern architecture. She has also contributed to local histories of architecture in her home state of Michoacán. Her more recent work, published in La arquitectura mexicana desde afuera (MAPorrua, 2017), explores the construction of an imaginary of Mexican architecture and relies on a variety of sources including the revision of fiction, postcards, and the houses of expats to understand the portrayal of Mexican architecture from the perspective of the United States. In 2021 she published Richard Neutra. Encounters with Latin America (Arquitónica). Since 1998 Dr. Ettinger has taught and advised theses in graduate programs related to heritage preservation, teaching both research methods, courses on the history of modern architecture, and theory of historic preservation. She has advised doctoral dissertations and master’s theses in preservation and architectural history. Ettinger has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University and at the University of Texas in Austin. She is a level III National Researcher, designated by Mexico’s National Council on Science and Technology.

Ashley Gardini, Diablo Valley College

Ashley Gardini is an adjunct instructor of architectural history at Diablo Valley College, where she teaches global architectural history surveys. Gardini also teaches the history of art and architecture at other community colleges around the San Francisco Bay Area. She earned her M.A. in Art History and Visual Culture from San Jose State University. Her previous research focused on the legacy of Italian Futurist architecture. Her essay, “The Reception of Futurist Architecture after the Second World War,” can be found in the 2018 edition of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies. Her current research interests focus on education and public engagement with architectural history, with a desired focus on students who have not been engaged with the built environment prior to college. In March 2019, she was featured in “The Realities of Adjuncting Today,” for the series Contingent Talk, produced for CAA Conversations Podcast, which focused on the precarious nature of the academic labor market. Gardini served on the Advisory Committee for the SAH Data Project from 2019 to 2021 and has served on the SAH Board in an interim role since July 2021.

Eric Paul Mumford, University of Washington in Saint Louis

Eric Paul Mumford is the Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture and Urban Design in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. His academic work is focused on the history of architectural design within its many metropolitan environmental contexts since the 1920s. He is currently a co-curator, with Michael Willis, NOMA, FAIA of the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum exhibition Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s–70s, scheduled to open in fall 2024. He is also the editor of the recently published Wrightwood 659 museum catalogue Ando and Le Corbusier, volume 2 (Chicago, 2021), from an exhibition that he curated there in 2018. Dr. Mumford is also an architect, and has published numerous books and articles on the history and theory of modern architecture and urbanism, including The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (MIT Press, 2000); Modern Architecture in St. Louis (Washington University, 2004); Defining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline, 1937–69 (Yale University Press, 2009); The Missouri Botanical Garden Climatron: A Celebration of 50 Years (St. Louis: Missouri Botanical Garden, 2009), and a textbook, Designing the Modern City: Urbanism Since 1850 (Yale University Press, 2018), among other works. He also has given many invited lectures nationally and internationally, most recently at the Itau Cultural Foundation in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2020, he received a Sam Fox School Creative Activity Research Grant, with Assistant Professor of Architecture Shantel Blakely, for the book The Charles E. Fleming House, forthcoming from MIT Press.

Jason Nguyen, University of Toronto

Jason Nguyen is an assistant professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. His research sits at the intersection of architecture, science and technology, and political economy in the early modern world. He is completing the manuscript for his first book, Theory & Expertise: The Art of Building in Old Regime France. The project charts how architects in 17th- and early 18th-century France theorized technical practice according to the methods of mechanical philosophy in an effort to claim expertise in the arts and economics of construction. What resulted was a profound reframing of architecture’s statutory function in civil society at the dawn of the modern age. More recently, his interests have centered on architecture’s relationship to global trade and the environment. Dr. Nguyen is working on a book-length study of European-supported entrepôts in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as they relate to early modern shipping networks and the formalization of the stock exchange. The project ties these complexes to technologies in cartography and navigation, corporate institutions of trade, and the deterritorialization of Indigenous seascapes in the development of global capitalism and empire. Nguyen received his PhD from Harvard University. His work has appeared in Grey Room, Journal 18, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Livraisons d’histoire de l’architecture, and Oxford Art Journal. His research has been supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, the Society of Fellows at the University of Southern California, and the Getty Research Institute. 

Vimalin Rujivacharakul, University of Delaware

Vimalin Rujivacharakul is Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Delaware in the United States, the 2021–2024 Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture, Tsinghua University in China, and a lifetime fellow of Clare Hall, University Cambridge. She received her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley where she was trained in architectural history, intellectual history, and cultural anthropology. She researches and publishes on Sino-European architectural and intellectual history, architectural cartography, the production of knowledge, history of collecting, and theories of things and material culture. Among her works are Architecturalized Asia (CHOICE Outstanding Book); Liang Sicheng and the Temple of Buddha’s Light (China Classic series, the Ministry of Education, China), and Collecting China: The World, China, and A Short History of Collecting, which became the ground for the Andrew W. Mellon-Freer|Sackler workshop that she co-directed at Winterthur Museum in 2017. Dr. Rujivacharakul’s scholarship has been supported by the Terra Foundation in American Art, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, Institute for Advanced Study, the Getty Research Institute, Social Science Research Council, the Needham Research Institute, and the Graham Foundation, among others. She is currently working on a global architectural history between the two world wars, and on the connections between artifacts and architectural history. At the University of Delaware, she supervises graduate students in both departments of Art History and Art Conservation working on material culture and materiality and the connection and disconnect between vernacular architecture and the UNESCO sites.

The full slate of officers and directors proposed for the election follows:

Nominations

Officers to serve a one-year term (April 2022–April 2023):
President, Patricia A. Morton, University of California, Riverside
First Vice President, Carla Yanni, Rutgers University
Second Vice President, Mohammad Gharipour, Morgan State University
Secretary, Lynne Horiuchi, Independent Scholar
Treasurer, Roberta Washington, FAIA, Roberta Washington Architects

SAH Board members to serve a three-year term (April 2022–April 2025):
Catherine Rose Ettinger, Universidad Michoacana San Nicolas de Hidalgo
Elisa Dainese, Georgia Institute of Technology
Jason Nguyen, University of Toronto
Eric Paul Mumford, University of Washington at Saint Louis
Ashley Gardini, Diablo Valley College

Interim SAH Board member to serve a two-year term (April 2022–April 2024):
Vimalin Rujivacharakul, University of Delaware (to replace Mohammad Gharipour’s seat on the SAH Board)

Nominating Committee
Fernando Lara, University of Texas at Austin (Chair)
Patricia Morton, SAH First Vice President, University of California, Riverside
Tanja Poppelreuter, University of Salford, Manchester
Valentina Rozas-Krause, University of Michigan
Ken Tadashi Oshima, University of Washington