PhD Student Bios
In addition to their studies, doctoral candidates are involved in many aspects of the school. Among other activities, they hold Research or Teaching Fellowships and organize speaker series, conferences, and journals.
Students generally take courses their first two years, and are engaged in research and teaching for at least two more years. After their fourth year, students may or may not remain in residency; many travel to pursue their research, either in the US or abroad.
Click here for recent PhD graduates.
Salma Abouelhossein is in her 7th year of the Ph.D. program in urban studies and planning. Her research interests are in urbanization and crisis, the materialities and ecologies of the finance economy, depeasantization and labor. Her dissertation is a historical geographical project that studies the entangled ways in which agro-ecological change in the Nile Valley of Egypt and Sudan was constitutive of emergent urbanization processes in the Middle East during the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on two sugarcane production regions in Egypt and Sudan, her dissertation studies the advent of regional ‘Gulf-led’ urbanization since the mid-1970s in relation to the consecutive global ‘food regimes’.
Salma’s research is supported by the Agha Khan program at Harvard University, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), and Harvard University’s Center for African Research. She holds a Master of Science degree in urban development and planning from the Bartlett, University College London and a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University in Cairo. Before starting her Ph.D. at Harvard university, she worked as an urban planner in Cairo in collaboration with several NGOs, international development organizations, governmental agencies and local municipalities.
Hugo Betting is an architect and a third-year Ph.D. student. His research explores the entanglement of architecture, science and environment in history, through texts and objects in the nineteenth and twentieth-century North Atlantic.
Integrating architectural history into the framework of cultural history, his current work examines how technology bears both practical and symbolic functions in nature’s exploitation, imitation, reproduction, and “recovery”; how “nature” was used as a moral, social, racial, organizational, and formal reference in the production of the built environment; or, in other words, how nature, human representations, and human productions interact.
His work on the idea of nature’s recovery at the Crystal Palace was presented at the annual Mahindra Humanities Center Graduate Student Conference at Harvard University. His forthcoming paper on the role of natural formations at the Riverside settlement in Illinois will be presented this November at the Symposium of Urban Design History and Theory, held in Delft.
Prior to arriving at Harvard, Hugo completed a Licence’s and a Master’s Degree from Paris La Villette School of Architecture and worked for various architecture studios in Paris. In 2021 and 2022, he received the Arthur Sachs Scholarship.
William Conroy is a PhD candidate in urban studies and planning at Harvard University. His ongoing dissertation project articulates a theorization of the role of urbanization in the reproduction of capitalist society, doing so with reference to the history of American anti-imperial thought after 1928.
William has presented his academic work at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers and at the Urban Affairs Association Conference, among many other fora. He took his PhD qualifying exams under the supervision of Neil Brenner, Katrina Forrester, and Walter Johnson, with his major exam developing a “reproductionist approach” to the historical geographies of capital, and his minor exam engaging the topic of race and the urban process in the imperial United States after 1870. His own research on those themes has appeared or is forthcoming in leading journals of urban studies, geography, and socio-spatial theory, including Antipode, Environment and Planning A, Theory, Culture & Society, and more. (For more information and publication details, please visit: https://harvard.academia.edu/WilliamConroy)
William has a BA (summa cum laude) from Northwestern University, an MPhil (with distinction) from the University of Oxford, and an AM from Harvard University, where he was named a Presidential Fellow. He is a Research Affiliate at the University of Chicago’s Urban Theory Lab. Prior to graduate school, William worked for several environmental organizations, including as a Princeton in Asia Fellow.
Yazmín M. Crespo Claudio, a Puerto Rican architect and educator, is co-founder/director of taller Creando Sin Encargos (tCSE), a Cambridge/San Juan-based collective working towards socio-spatial design for urban justice since 2012. Crespo-Claudio is a Lecturer and Ph.D. candidate in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning at Harvard University. She completed a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies and is working on a certificate in Latin American Studies. Her scholarship addresses the relationship between architecture, education, media, and territory, focusing on pedagogical experiments of architecture in Latin America and the Caribbean. She holds a Master in Design Studies in History and Theory of Architecture from Harvard GSD, a Master of Architecture in Urban Design and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, and a Bachelor’s in Environmental Design from the Universidad de Puerto Rico’s School of Architecture.
Before coming to Harvard, Crespo-Claudio was the Chair of the Department of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Interior Design and Assistant Professor at the Universidad Ana G. Méndez in Puerto Rico. She has also taught at Harvard GSD; New York Institute of Technology; Universidad Politécnica de Puerto Rico; Elisava Escola Universitària de Disseny i Enginyeria de Barcelona; Universidad de Puerto Rico; Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico where she was a Professor and Coordinator of the Bachelor of Arts in Design; and Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Her writings have been published in, among others, De Arquitectura, Bitácora Urbano Territorial, Arquine, Polimorfo, ACSA and UIA proceedings, in the books Aprender Arquitectura by Arquine, Repository: 49 Methods and Assignments for Writing Urban Places by COST Action CA181126, and Placemaking with Children and Youth by Louise Chawla et al (co-authored), among others.
She has presented her work at several venues including the CAA Annual Conference, LASA Conference, Docomomo International Conference, CEISAL International Conference, Jornadas de Investigación Género, Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo FADU UBA, World Congress of Architects UIA, Participatory Design Conference, ACSA International Conference, among others. Her work has been exhibited at the 13th International Architecture Biennale São Paulo (tCSE), Participatory Design Conference Newcastle upon Tyne (tCSE), Storefront for Art and Architecture NYC (tCSE), Kirkland Gallery Cambridge, AIA Puerto Rico, Museu Marítim de Barcelona, and the curation of several art, architecture, and design exhibits. Crespo-Claudio’s work has been recognized with various awards including the Edita Technical Chamber of Greece at the XIX Congress UIA, and as an Associate Designer at Perkins Eastman the World Architecture Award 2009, and the AIA NY Merit Award for the TKTS Booth in New York.
Crespo-Claudio is the recipient of the American Association University Women (AAUW) Dissertation Fellowship 2023-24. In 2022, She was awarded the Harvard Frederick Sheldon Fellowship and the Jorge Paulo Lemann Fellowship, and the Racial, GSD Equity, and Anti-Racism Fund for Archive IN/IN: International Intersectional Feminism in 2023. Her research has been supported by the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and Harvard GSD.
Samira Daneshvar is a PhD Candidate in History and Theory of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and a Master of Arts student in History of Science at Harvard University. She explores key episodes in the histories of science, media, and technology, with particular interest in materiality and body-environment relations. Her dissertation project focuses on history of radiation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, investigating conceptual leaps in environmental thinking that arose alongside the innovative techniques for visualizing radiation. She pursues this history through an interdisciplinary examination of figures, apparatuses, media, and sites that spurred theoretical analyses of spaces between and within bodies. Samira is advised by K. Michael Hays, Giuliana Bruno, Lorraine Daston, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Edward Eigen. She is a recipient of Harvard GSAS Merit Fellowship for her dissertation research.
Samira holds a Master of Architecture from University of Toronto and a Master of Science from University of Michigan. She joined the design discipline after five years of medical studies in Iran. Prior to joining Harvard, Samira taught at University of Miami and practiced in Toronto. Her writings have appeared in Winterthur Portfolio (The University of Chicago Press), Thresholds Journal (MIT Press), Informa, Inflection Journal, and Centre, among others. She has exhibited her work at MIT (Keller Gallery), Fashion Art Toronto, University of Texas at Austin, and Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University.
Taylor Davey is a seventh-year PhD candidate researching the development and dissemination of standardized calculative tools used by local governments to inventory, report, and strategize reductions related to city greenhouse gas emissions. The project builds off a political ecology foundation to theorize on the territorial and scalar articulations of climate change governance produced by emerging urban planning and energy planning frameworks. Focusing on the Canadian context, the research explores how new local policy objects relevant to global politics are produced through these technical practices and assesses the socio-political implications of utilizing greenhouse gas benchmarks as the dominant guide to realize urban energy transitions.
Taylor holds a Bachelor of Architectural Studies and M.Arch from the University of Waterloo and an MA in Urban Planning from Harvard University. Taylor was a lecturer at Northeastern University School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs (2021–23) where she has led graduate classes on urban history, planning theory, and local climate governance. She has editorial experience at Log journal, The Architectural Review, and Harvard GSD Publications. Taylor has previously received a Canada Weatherhead Doctoral Fellowship, a Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative Doctoral Fellowship, and a SSHRC Canada Doctoral Fellowship. She is currently a Graduate Student Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Romain David is an architect and historian now in his fourth year in the program. His research connects the architectural neo-avant-garde with the afterlives of colonialism and emerging post-colonial networks of globalization and labor during the 1990s, with a specific focus on the Dutch firm OMA. The project is a “global micro-history” and multi-sited archival research across South-East Asia, the United States, and Europe. More broadly, Romain has interest in management theory and organizations, labor, and the architectural profession. As side-projects, Romain also worked on Japanese post-68 architectural avant-garde or Kenzo Tange’s Renaissance and imperial imagination.
Romain holds a Bachelor’s in cinema studies from Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle and a Bachelor’s and a Master’s in architectural design from Paris La Villette School of Architecture. He received in 2018 the Prix du Mémoire de Master en Architecture by the Fondation Rémy Butler and he was an Arthur Sachs Fellow in 2020 and 2021. During the summer of 2023, Romain was part of the Doctoral Research Residency Program at the CCA in Montréal.
His writings had been published in Plan Libre, Pli, and San Rocco.
Beyond his academic work, he is also an avid explorer of the suburbia and its untapped world of warehouses, pinball temples, jump-parks, and gated communities.
Phillip Denny is a PhD candidate working on histories of architectural prefabrication, colonialism, and urbanization in the twentieth century. He is advised by Antoine Picon and Sarah M. Whiting. Phillip was a Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellow in Germany for the 2021–22 academic year.
Phillip frequently writes about architecture, art, and design. His writing has appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Volume, Metropolis, The New York Times, and other publications. Recent projects include a genealogy of “creaturely” architecture in Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech, edited by K. Michael Hays and Andrew Holder (Harvard University Press), and The Art of Joining: Designing the Universal Connector (Leipzig: Spector Books), a pocketbook anthology of original research on the architect Konrad Wachsmann. He is a member of the editorial board of Architect’s Newspaper and editor of New York Review of Architecture. In 2020, Phillip co-founded a83, a gallery and organization in Soho, New York, with a three-part mission to exhibit, publish, and promote experimental projects in architecture, art, and design.
Phillip completed his Master of Architecture degree at Princeton University, where he graduated with the certificate in Media + Modernity, and received the School of Architecture History and Theory Prize. He received a Master’s degree from Harvard University in 2019. He also holds a professional Bachelor of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was awarded the Louis F Valentour Fellowship, the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation Prize for Architecture History, and the AIA Henry Adams Medal. He has practiced in numerous roles with architecture firms and organizations in the United States and Europe, including OMA/Rem Koolhaas, MOS Architects of New York, and C-Lab at Columbia University. In 2018, Phillip was a fellow of the Bauhaus Global Modernism Lab in Dessau, Germany. In 2019, he received a Graham Foundation grant to support his work on an English-language translation of Nicolas Schöffer’s 1969 urban manifesto La ville cybernétique.
[email protected]
phillipdenny.com
Hayley Eaves is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate interested in the history and theory of European architecture and urban space during the Baroque and Enlightenment eras.
Hayley’s current research examines developments in early modern theatre architecture and stage design, considering such topics and themes as the ways in which architecture and architectural thinking were transformed by the dramatic arts and became increasingly tied to other modes of rhetorical address practiced on stage; cultures of secrecy and rivalry characteristic of the profession of ‘scenic designer’ and among practitioners of esoteric theatre-technological knowledge; yet undecided relations between the role and reputation of stage managers called “il corago” or impresari and military commanders responsible for overseeing dynamic theatres of war; scenographic theory and its precarious relationship to practice; aesthetic and spatial programs for auditoria; and the pan-European legacy of architectural dynasties active in theatre and set design, including the families Galliari, Quaglio, and Galli da Bibiena.
Hayley’s interest in theatre architecture began following her visit to the Teatro Goldoni in Florence, Italy, in 2015. Equally inspired by the writings and life of the theatre’s namesake, that of the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni, Hayley was inspired to complete her master’s thesis at McGill University on the role and representation of a topic much debated in Goldoni’s creative work: Commedia dell’arte, being a form of Renaissance comic theatre with crude plots and characters like the gnocchi-loving scoundrel Punch (Pulcinella). While completing her degree, Hayley spent time as a Research Library Reader at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, where she consulted copious visual materials from both the Italian Theatre Prints Collection and the Stage and Theatre Design Collection. Prior to matriculating to Harvard in 2020, Hayley completed a three-month research residency at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Institute of Theatre and Opera in Venice, Italy.
For the 2023-24 academic year, Hayley will fulfill the role of MDes Research Tutor in the Narratives Program and will partake in a digital exhibition project with the Harvard Art Museums. The exhibition, which aims to shed light on the material culture of the Crusades, will feature over one-hundred individual objects from the Museums’ collections.
Tamer Elshayal is an urbanist working at the intersection of urban theory, critical geography, environmental anthropology, and science and technology studies. His current research seeks to examine the shifting spatialities of mega-engineering in the Middle East through the study of spatial and cultural politics of large infrastructural projects. He is interested in how large engineering schemes reconfigure territories and landscapes as they take shape in discursive and material mediums and how they engender contested socio-spatial formations.
Tamer is an associate member of the Spatial Ethnography Lab, a research collaborative co-founded and led by anthropologist Vyjayanthi Rao. He is also a research member of Neil Brenner’s Urban Theory Lab at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, in which he works on the spatial and political dimensions of extractive economies and large-scale water and energy infrastructure in the restructuring of North Africa. Tamer previously worked as a research assistant in the Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure, focusing on water and energy infrastructure in the US. Furthermore, reflecting his shared interests in critical geography and environmental anthropology, he was awarded the Penny White summer grant to conduct fieldwork in Egypt, investigating the infrastructural landscapes of coastal engineering works in the Nile Delta.
Tamer holds a Master in Design Studies in Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), a Master of Landscape Architecture from FH Anhalt, Germany; a Post-professional Certificate in GIS and Environment from Salford University, UK; and a Bachelor of Architecture from Faculty of Fine Arts, Egypt. Tamer has previously worked as landscape architect in Germany and Egypt, and as an environmental researcher at the Center for the Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage, Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
José Carlos Fernández is a third-year PhD student developing a historical research on Peruvian cities. Drawing on archives of 19th and 20th centuries that include the National Land Registry, he explores forms of collective tenure of urban land (such as housing associations, cooperatives, and confraternities) which challenge the individualist philosophy of the laws in Peruvian modern history.
Before joining the PhD program, between 2020 and 2021, he held the position of Director of Urbanism of the Ministry of Housing of Peru, where he led the development and passing into law of the 2021 National Urban Reform. Prior to this, Jose Carlos worked as an associate and senior associate at the Lima office of Baker McKenzie law firm. He has also served as legal advisor to the World Bank and to the Metropolitan Institute of Planning of Lima.
He has worked as professor of Property Law at the Catholic University Law School and has also taught seminars on urbanism at the schools of architecture of Catholic University and the National University of Engineering in Lima, Peru.
Jose Carlos holds a Master in Urban Planning from Harvard University and is also a licensed lawyer graduated from the School of Law of Catholic University of Peru.
Morgan Forde is a third year PhD student in Urban Planning and a 2023 Pforzheimer Fellow with Harvard University Libraries. Her research focuses on the urban history of radical Black communities in the United States from 1840-1980, with a particular focus on the Resurrection City project led by the Poor People’s Campaign, various Afro-socialist groups, and the Black Panther Party.
Morgan holds an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies with distinction from the University of Cambridge and a bachelor’s degree in International Politics and Security Studies from Georgetown University. Formerly a journalist and editor, her work has appeared in The Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Mic, Popular Mechanics, Ploughshares, and Smart Cities Dive.
Charlie Gaillard is a first-year Ph.D. student in the History and Theory of Architecture. His research interests, broadly outlined, concern the entwined development of nineteenth-century American architecture and transportation networks. By studying the new and hybrid architectural forms that emerged amid the so-called “American System,” Charlie aims to investigate the incipient conditions of modern urbanization, paying attention to the propinquities and frictions that these transportation networks produced alongside their efficiencies.
Charlie holds a Master in Design Studies from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Art History and English from Williams College. Prior to earning his Masters degree, Charlie worked as a strategist at the New York design consultancy 2×4 before joining the GSD’s Office for Urbanization (OFU). There, he contributed to design research projects on mass transit, climate change adaptation, and new town planning. With Charles Waldheim and OFU, Charlie co-authored 50 Species-Towns, a 2022 publication that presents a speculative approach to rural urbanization in China. He also produces the GSD’s Future of the American City conversation series. Charlie lives in Somerville, MA with his wife Catherine and son Paul.
Swarnabh Ghosh is a PhD candidate in urban history and planning, and a secondary field candidate in Science, Technology, and Society (STS). His research focuses on the uneven and combined geographies of irrigation, infrastructure, and capitalism in late-colonial and postcolonial South Asia. His dissertation examines the preconditions and crisis-riven afterlives of the “Green Revolution” in northwestern India through a multiscalar historical geography of uneven development from the late-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries. In 2023-24, he is a Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellow and a Dissertation Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
His recent publications include a paper (with Neil Brenner) on the relationship between processes of extended urbanization, neoliberal agro-industrial restructuring, and the political ecologies of emergent infectious disease; an essay on work and the labor process in the global construction industry; and a paper (with Ayan Meer) on the conceptual convergences between critical agrarian studies and urban theoretical scholarship on planetary urbanization. His broader interests include geographical political economy, political ecology, critical urban theory, state theory, and the historical geography of capitalism from the nineteenth century to the present.
Swarnabh is a Research Affiliate at the Urban Theory Lab, formerly based at the GSD, currently based in the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. His research has been supported by the Harvard GSAS Graduate Society, the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, the Weatherhead Center, and the IJURR Foundation. His work has appeared in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Dialogues in Human Geography, Urban Studies, and The Avery Review, among other publications.
Swarnabh holds a Master of Philosophy in Urban Studies (with distinction) from the University of Cambridge where he studied as a Bass Scholar and a Master of Architecture from Yale University. Before coming to Harvard, he worked for several years at Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York City where he was involved in projects spanning art, media, and architecture.
Sarah Hutcheson (she/they) is a 6th year PhD candidate with a focus on early modern Britain and the British Empire. Her dissertation research examines royal building projects after the Restoration of the monarchy, and the problems of renegotiating the relationship between politics and space in the years following regicide and revolution. Sarah holds an MSc in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies from the University of Edinburgh and a BA in History from Vassar College.
Hannah Kaemmer is a PhD candidate working on the built environments of empire and the intersection of science, environment, and architecture in the early modern period. Her dissertation project considers the relationship between engineering and empire building in seventeenth-century England. Focusing on fortifications constructed across the English empire, it traces how military architecture was wielded to overcome a distant, diverse, and unstable global imperial network. Other recent research has explored how architecture was employed as a means of social control, and as a medium to interpret ‘strange’ archaeological and historical sites in early modern Britain. Her work has appeared in Nuncius and Post-Medieval Archaeology.
Hannah holds a Master of Arts with distinction in the Archaeology of Buildings from the University of York and a Bachelor of Arts in History from Williams College. Before her PhD, she was a resident fellow at the Preservation Society of Newport County, where she researched patron-architect relationships in late-19th century America. She also previously worked as a consultant for nonprofit arts and cultural organizations across the U.S. Her dissertation research has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Renaissance Society of America, the Yale Center for British Art, and the North American Conference on British Studies. She is currently the Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.
Hanan Kataw is a PhD candidate whose research looks at discourse-making practices in the Western discipline of architecture, focusing on the rise of the digital discourses of the 1990s and examining the social and institutional systems and power relations that conditioned and shaped these discourses.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in Architecture Engineering from The University of Jordan, where she was awarded the Issa Hassan Abu Al Ragheb Award for Academic Excellence. She also holds a Master of Arts in Architectural History with distinction from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Her master’s thesis focused on the architect’s agency and the politics of knowledge in the “digital generative architecture” discourse.
She has worked as a visiting lecturer at Al-Zaytoonah University in Jordan, where she taught a class on the theories and applications of Building Information Modeling (BIM). She was also a research consultant at Studio-X Amman, run by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and the Columbia Global Centers, where her research focused on the history of urban planning in the city of Amman and the different digital technologies used in mapping the urban change and their influence on the ways the city has been represented and narrated. In 2019, Hanan participated in the Global Modernism curatorial research residency at the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany, and edited Handle with Care: Unpacking a Bulky Table, an anthology that looks at a table designed by Marcel Breuer as a case study, investigating the incorporation of everyday objects into the design canons. Hanan’s doctoral research has been supported by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The Weatherhead Center, and The Charles Babbage Institute. In 2022, she was named ACADIA (The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture) inaugural cultural history fellow.
Matthew Kennedy is a designer, writer, and educator operating between Mexico City and Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2020, he formally partnered with longtime collaborator Andrés Harvey to establish the architecture and design studio Cosa, which seeks to explore the relationship between local material culture and global economic networks via architectural and interior interventions, experimental preservation, exhibition design, objects, and research. Prior to establishing Cosa, he worked in architecture offices including Frida Escobedo Taller de Arquitectura, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, and The Fautory. Since 2017, Matthew has served as the assistant editor of the journal Faktur: Documents and Architecture, and is the co-author of the forthcoming book The Advanced School of Collective Feeling: Inhabiting Physical Culture, 1926-38 (Park Books, 2022). From 2020 to 2022 he taught design studios and architectural theory at the Pennsylvania State University, where he helped lay the groundwork for the PhD student-edited journal Hyphen. He has been an invited critic at schools such as Yale University, Columbia University, and UC Berkeley. He has presented work at venues including the Center for Architecture (New York, NY) and The Berlage (Delft, NL), and has participated in panel discussions at LIGA (Mexico City, MX) and SCI-Arc (Los Angeles, CA), among others. Matthew holds a Masters of Architecture from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation.
Photo credit: Portrait by Enrique R. Aguilar for MENTES vol. 2, 2022.
Gabriel Kozlowski is a Brazilian architect and curator. He is principal at the architectural firm POLES.studio.
Gabriel was Assistant Curator for the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2021. Past curated exhibitions include “Walls of Air” (the Brazilian Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale) and “Housing+” (the 3rd Biennial Exhibit of the MIT L. Center for Advanced Urbanism). His recent books include: The World as an Architectural Project (MIT Press, 2020); 8 Reactions for Afterwards (RioBooks, 2019); and Walls of Air: Brazilian Pavilion 2018 (Bienal de São Paulo, 2018).
Graduated from the Master of Science in Urban Design program at MIT, Gabriel has held research positions at the School of Architecture and Planning, the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism and the Senseable City Lab, and taught graduate-level seminars, workshops and studios at the same school.
For his PhD at Harvard, Gabriel is looking at the history of urbanization in the Amazon basin. His research interest suggests that the way politics and power got spatialized in that region has defined the framework through which we conceive of and relate to the Amazon, and that a new reading of it can, in turn, inform the way we understand and address broader urbanization processes as well as the responses from our design disciplines.
[email protected]
gabrielkozlowski.com
tomorrowanew.org
Anny Li is a first year PhD student in architecture, landscape, and urban history. Her research focuses on spatial and environmental histories of plant science and their imbrication with the production of empire. She is interested in the materiality of scientific practice and environmental management, and in exploring the use of plants as building material alongside the political ecologies of spontaneous urban vegetation. She holds a Master in Design Studies in History and Philosophy of Design and Media from Harvard GSD, where she wrote her thesis on the infrastructural and paper technologies of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plant introduction program.
Anny has a background and strong interest in archives, knowledge infrastructures, and material history. Her professional experience includes work in special collections libraries, including Frances Loeb Library’s Special Collections and Houghton Library, where she supported their exhibitions, communications, and public programs. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked on communications and publications at Snøhetta, and has been a writer and editor at various architecture and landscape architecture firms for over 6 years. She has been an invited speaker in courses at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, Yale School of Architecture, Harvard GSD, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and has edited and been published in publications including the New York Review of Architecture, Failed Architecture, POOL, Constructs, and volume 1. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University.
Sunghwan Lim is a licensed engineer in architecture and building facilities. He is a second-year Ph.D. student in Architecture, concentrating in Architectural Technology, advised by Professor Ali Malkawi. His research focuses on sustainable and high-performance building technologies, with particular interests in energy simulation, natural ventilation, and HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning) system studies. Sunghwan is currently working on developing innovative building control systems and increasing the potential of natural ventilation at the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities.
Sunghwan earned his Master in Design Studies (MDes) degree in Energy and Environment from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2021. He received the Dean’s Merit Scholarship during his study and his master’s thesis, entitled Controlling Wind Pressure around Building by Multiangle Ventilation Louver for Higher Natural Ventilation Potential, was awarded to Daniel L. Schodek Award for Technology and Sustainability.
Before joining the Harvard community, Sunghwan double majored in Interior Architecture & Built Environment and Architecture & Architectural Engineering at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. After receiving his bachelor’s degree, Sunghwan worked as a construction engineer at Samsung Construction and Trading company for six years. His invaluable experiences with building an airport in Mongolia and constructing a residential complex in Seoul profoundly shaped his research ideas and motivated him to contribute to the field of architecture.
Adam Longenbach is a PhD candidate in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning. He is also a 2023-2024 Graduate Fellow in Ethics at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics and a 2023 Harvard Horizons Scholar.
In his dissertation, Adam researches the mid-twentieth century entanglement of wartime policies, government agencies, private sector collaborations, and mass media technologies that led to the production of military “mock villages.” Constructed by the US Army Corps of Engineers in collaboration with architects, landscape architects, and Hollywood scenographers, mock villages were—and remain—elaborate stage sets where the US military rehearses combat operations before conducting them in actual theaters of war. His dissertation focuses on the Pacific Theater and especially the western United States where, in the 1940s, mock villages emerged as a key military technology in the war between the US and Japan. A goal of this research is to demonstrate how the invention of a novel form of architecture—the military mock village—coincided with the production of new forms of violence and destruction that persist today. In addition to the Safra Center, his project has been supported by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Graham Foundation.
Before coming to Harvard, Adam practiced for nearly a decade in several design offices including Olson Kundig Architects, Allied Works Architecture, and Snøhetta, where he was the director of post-occupancy research. His writing can be found in Thresholds, The Avery Review, and Log, among others.
Adil Mansure is a second-year PhD student at the GSD and his interests are located at the intersection of technology and complexity science, language studies, and the history and theory of art and architecture. He has previously co-edited Finding San Carlino: Collected Perspectives on the Geometry of the Baroque (Routledge 2019) and curated the traveling exhibit Instrumentalies of an Eternal Baroque, in which he pursued a ‘History and Theory via drawing and making’ method of historical inquiry. His theory project The Architecture of Cliché uses everyday language phenomena as spaces to model the complexities of our participation in a shared medium. Adil is currently also pursuing a circumpolar oral history project exploring how architectural space emerges through language, specifically out of the stories of various Indigenous peoples along our Northern latitudes (initially made possible by the H. Allen Brooks Traveling Fellowship awarded by the Society of Architectural Historians). Adil has previously worked in architecture studios in Toronto, New York, and Mumbai; and has taught studios and graduate seminars based on his interests at the University of Toronto, the University at Buffalo, Wenzhou-Kean University, OCAD University, and Laurentian University. He holds an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies from Cambridge University, an M. Arch II from Yale University, and a B. Arch from Mumbai University.
Sarah Moses is a third-year PhD student whose recent work examines segregationist projects at beachfront leisure sites in the United States as attempts to spatialize race—to materialize ideas about race in space—and to racialize space—to make Black users experience disparate treatment in their movement across space, through surveillance, bars to access, and dictates of decorum. Her chapter about Denise Scott Brown’s work with a Black citizens’ committee to oppose a destructive expressway development in Philadelphia appears in Frida Grahn, ed. Denise Scott Brown: With Others’ Eyes.
Sarah holds both a Master of Architecture and a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where the focus of her research was conflict between the collective desire to memorialize and the protective impulse to stigmatize, sanitize, or obliterate sites with traumatic or violent associations.
Prior to her enrollment at Harvard, Sarah was a public historian for the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission where she wrote about lesser-known episodes in New York City’s past: female reformers’ creation of the first purpose-built kindergarten in Brooklyn, the adaptation of Civil War-era manufactories by Abstract Expressionist artists for use as studios, and Redemption-era racism through the lens of Tin Pan Alley’s 1890s-1910s popular music businesses.
Miranda Shugars is a first year Ph.D. student with an interest in late twentieth century preservation movements in Latin American cities. She has a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, where she researched community development corporations in Harlem and architectural practices in Havana, Cuba. She also holds an undergraduate degree in visual and studio art from Harvard College.
Before joining the Ph.D. program, Miranda taught advanced studio courses as a Visiting Professor of Practice at Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture. At Virginia Tech she also developed a course on social mapping and GIS with a regional focus in Appalachia, which received support and recognition from other departments at the university and won the ACSA / Temple Hoyne Buell Center’s 2023 Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society.
Before teaching, she worked as an architect at RODE Architects in Boston, MA on the largest supportive housing project north of New York City, as well as flood-resilient, Passive House, and community-oriented projects. She has also worked at firms in Boston and New York specializing in affordable housing, historic preservation, and adaptive reuse.
Caroline Filice Smith is doctoral candidate in Urban Planning and the ‘22-‘23 Democracy Doctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. Their work focuses on racialized histories of urban design across the US and its empire, histories of activist planner-architects, and reparative and abolitionist models of urban design. Caroline’s dissertation project explores the emergence of “participatory planning” in the mid-twentieth century. Through a focus on federally funded—yet activist led—community action programs in the US, Caroline’s research examines how the Black Power movement, the War on Poverty, and models of community development originally designed to quell insurgency abroad, intersected to form the foundation of a now central paradigm of US urban planning practice. This work touches on issues of democratic social engineering, cold war imperialism, 20th century anti-racist urban uprisings, and struggles for self-determination across the US.
In addition to their dissertation, Caroline teaches and conducts research as part of the Urban Design and the Color Line project and has recently completed an anti-racist planning toolkit with the Highline Network and the Urban Institute (link), and a report for the Architectural League of NY on landscape and community-led, post-coal futures for Appalachia. They are a Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative doctoral fellow, having previously served as an Irving Innovation Fellow, and their work has been funded by the Graham Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Warren Center for American Studies, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. Caroline holds a Master of Architecture in Urban Design with Distinction from the GSD, where they were awarded both the Thesis Prize and Academic Excellence Award in Urban Design – additionally, Caroline holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech. Prior to coming to Harvard, Caroline spent five years in professional architectural practice – most of which was spent working for UNStudio in their Shanghai office, and less of which was spent practicing in Los Angeles where they were actively involved in the Occupy movement.
Sam Tabory is a fifth-year PhD student. He studies the governance and negotiation of urban-regional systems transitions, paying attention to questions of scale, infrastructure, and boundary. He is interested in how transitions and alternative governance logics interact with evolving spatial and temporal understandings of crisis under conditions of global environmental change. His work considers how conventions of both growth and polity are implicated by such ideas of crisis. Trained both as a planner and a Latin Americanist, comparative and global perspectives inform his work. His interests are interdisciplinary and multi-scalar across planning, law, and urban science. An element of Sam’s focus on transitions includes an interest in the speculative and propositional work of intervening in support of urban systems transitions.
Prior to doctoral studies, Sam worked in urban science-policy engagement for a Sustainability Research Network supported by the US National Science Foundation and as a research associate with the global cities research team at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Professionally, he has contributed to reports commissioned by UN Environment, the World Bank, and NATO. His scholarly work has been published in Global Environmental Change.
Sam holds master’s degrees in urban planning and Latin American studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies from Tulane University.
Eldra Dominique Walker is an architectural historian whose dissertation examines the theme of the “primitive” in nineteenth-century French architectural thought and practice. She received the support of the Bourse Jeanne Marandon from the Société de professeurs français et francophones d’Amérique (SPFFA), the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard University, and the Pforzheimer Fellowship from the Harvard Library. More broadly, Modern European Architecture (1750-1950) is her primary field, and her additional research interests include transnational histories, architectural literature, intersections between race and architecture, history and theory of architectural ornament, and the theory and practice of architectural preservation.
Eldra has presented work at conferences organized by the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the European Architectural History Network, and the Première Université d’été de programme STARACO (STAtus, RAce, et COuleur) at the University of Nantes.
Currently, she is a lecturer and principal advisor to the MDesign Historic Preservation Program for the Department of Architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Additionally, she was the Nettie Seabrooks Graduate Curatorial Intern in European Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where she assisted museum curators with an upcoming exhibition entitled “Color of Faith.” Eldra has taught courses at the GSD in Western Architectural history and theory, from the Renaissance to the present. Before coming to Harvard, Eldra was an architectural design reviewer in the District of Columbia Office of Planning. Eldra has an MS in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania and a BS from Morgan State University.
Xiaoshi Wang is a PhD candidate in the Harvard PhD of Architecture program, and his research focuses on exploring potential connection between geometrical spatial layout and indoor natural ventilation evaluation. He tries to propose and test a method of embodying such connection with expandable CFD dataset and machine learning model implemented to first predict the air flow pattern inside a multi-room indoor space layout, and then optimize this space layout towards a better flow pattern, so as to form a design iteration loop. Xiaoshi is also interested in involving human preference in the design iteration and develop a human-AI interactive mechanism. Before entering his PhD track, Xiaoshi holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Tongji University in China, a Master of Science in architecture degree from Columbia University in New York, and a Master of Design degree from Harvard Graduate School of Design. Xiaoshi is currently based in China.
Angela Wheeler is a sixth-year PhD candidate and graduate associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Her dissertation examines historic neighborhood conservation in the postwar Soviet Union and its development as an urban planning tool, site of transnational exchange, and arena for local identity politics. She is broadly interested in the history of heritage conservation movements, experimental and activist approaches to heritage, and the role of preservation pedagogy in design curricula.
After working with the International Council of Monuments and Sites as a Fulbright grantee in Tbilisi and conducting HUD surveys of Hawaii public housing, she completed an MSc in Historic Preservation at Columbia University. Her thesis, Socialist in Form, National in Content, investigated official attempts to reconcile historic preservation and postmodern aesthetics with Soviet ideology in the Brezhnev era.
Angela’s recent projects include a Graham Foundation grant for “Indigenous Outsiders: Endangered Islamic Heritage in the Republic of Georgia,” an exhibition and publication documenting the wooden mosques of Georgia’s Adjaran Muslim community. Her chapter on mosques of Russia and the Caucasus appeared in Rizzoli’s Mosques: Splendors of Islam (2017) and her book, the Tbilisi volume for DOM’s Architectural Guides series (2023), offers the first comprehensive English-language guide to the city since glasnost. Angela has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on architecture and urban history at Amherst College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Ziwei Zhang is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Urban planning, specializing in the study of agrarian transformation, labor dynamics, resource utilization, and state-society relationship, as influenced by economic thought and ideological conceptualization. Her research revolves around the historical trajectory of environmental change, ecological discourse, and agricultural modernization in twentieth-century China. Her works have been presented at Global Environmental Justice Conference at Yale and Social Science History Association. Besides her main work in China, she also works on projects in Indonesia and Mexico regarding land tenure, resource management, and institutional building.
Ziwei holds a Master in Landscape Architecture, a Master in Design Studies in Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), and a Bachelor of Architecture from Southeast University, China. She has also experience as an urban designer for one year for Stoss Landscape Urbanism, where she participated in projects in China, the U.S., and the United Arab Emirates.