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April Symposium Speakers

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, Ph.D. (1999) in Art History, University of California Los Angeles, is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She has published on the urban and architectural history of Islamic societies. Her first book, The Image of an Ottoman City Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries, won the 2006 Spiro Kostof Award. This urban and architectural study of Aleppo, a center of early modern global trade, drew upon archival and narrative texts, architectural evidence, and contemporary theoretical discussions of the relation between imperial ideology, urban patterns and rituals, and architectural form. By viewing the urban and social contexts of these acts, tracing their evolution over two centuries, and examining their discussion in Ottoman and Arabic sources, her book proposed a new model for understanding the local reception and adaptation of imperial forms, institutions and norms.

Denis Cosgrove

Denis Cosgrove is Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work has evolved from a focus on the meanings of landscape in Human and Cultural Geography, especially as these have evolved in Western Europe since the fifteenth century, to a broader concern with the role of spatial images and representations in the making and communicating of knowledge. This broad concern has been pursued through a series of focussed studies: of landscape transformation, design and images in sixteenth-century Venice and north Italy, of landscape writings by authors such as John Ruskin, of landscape, space and performance in twentieth century Rome, of cosmography in early modern Europe (1450-1650), and of the history of Western imaginings of the globe and whole earth. He has also written extensively on theory in Cultural Geography and edited for six years the journal Ecumene which publishes cross-disciplinary work on environment, culture and meaning.

Selected Publications:

Social formation and Symbolic Landscape. (2nd edition with additional introductory chapter), Wisconsin Univ. Press, 1998

The Palladian landscape: geographical change and its cultural representations in sixteenth century Italy.

"Global illumination and enlightenment in the geographies of Vincenzo Coronelli and Athanasius Kircher" in C.Withers & D.Livingstone eds. Enlightenment Geographies, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2000, 33-66.

"Urban rhetoric and embodied identities: city, nation and empire at the Vittorio Emanuele II monument in Rome 1870-1945" (with D. Atkinson) Annals, Association of American Geographers, 88, 1, 1998, 28-49.

Apollo's canvas: a cosmographic genealogy of Western imaginings of the globe and whole earth Johns Hopkins Univ. Press (in press)

Werner Oechslin

Werner Oechslin has been full Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the ETH Zurich since 1985, and chairman of the Institute of the History and Theory of Architecture from 1986 to 1998.

Born in 1944 in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, Prof. Oechslin studied art history, archaeology, philosophy and mathematics in Zurich and Rome, received his doctorate in Zurich in 1970, and was an assistant at the University of Zurich from 1971 to 1974. In 1975 and 1978 he taught at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Following qualification as a lecturer (habilitation) in Berlin in 1980, Prof. Oechslin was appointed to a professorship in Bonn, where he taught from 1980 to 1985. In 1985 he came on invitation to Geneva; subsequently he took over, as Prof. Ordinarius, the Chair of the History of Art and Architecture at the ETH Zurich, and in 1986 the chairmanship of the Institute of the History and Theory of Architecture. In 1987 he was a guest professor at Harvard University.

Prof. Oechslin has published prolifically in the area of art and architectural history from the 15th to the 20th century. The emphasis of his research and publications are studies of architectural theory, the architecture of the modern, the 18th century, and investigation of special problems of architectural drawing, architectural typology, and ephemeral architecture. In addition, Prof. Oechslin has worked on several exhibitions. He was on the editorial board of Lotus International and archithese. From 1981 to 1998 he was a coeditor of Daidalos. He is also on the board of the CCA (Montréal) and member of many scientific organisations.

Alberto Perez-Gomez

Alberto Pérez-Gómez's numerous articles have been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, AA Files, Arquitecturas Bis, Section A, VIA, Architectural Design, ARQ, SKALA, A+U, Perspecta, and many other periodicals. His first book in English, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (MIT Press, 1983) won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 1984, a prize awarded every two years for the most significant work of scholarship in the field.

In January 1987 Pérez-Gómez was appointed Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture at McGill University, where he is currently Director of Post-Professional (Master's and Doctoral) Programs, and chairs the History and Theory of Architecture division. From March 1990 to June 1993, he was also the Founding Director of the Institut de recherche en histoire de l'architecture, a research institute which he instigated, co-sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Université de Montréal and McGill University. Students of Dr. Pérez-Gómez now teach most Canadian architecture programs, and in many North American and European Universities.

Dr. Pérez-Gómez is the author of Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited (MIT Press, 1992), an erotic narrative/theory of architecture that retells the love story of the famous fifteenth century novel/treatise Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in late twentieth-century terms, a text that has become the source of numerous projects and exhibitions. He is also co-editor of a now well-established series of books entitled CHORA: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (McGill-Queen's University Press), which collects essays exploring fundamental questions concerning the practice of architecture through its history and theories. A recent major book co-authored with Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (MIT Press, 1997), traces the history and theory of modern European architectural representation, with special reference to the role of projection in architectural design.

Tom Conley

Tom Conley is a Professor of French and Director of Graduate Studies at Harvard University. He has written several important books on maps in French literature, including The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing. Cambridge Studies in French. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Pres, 1992. He has also translated major works by Gilles Deleuze and Michel de Certeau. Aside from his work on early modern French literature, he has written extensively on French classical cinema.

Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960 and was educated at Waseda University and the University of Hamburg. She made her debut as a writer with Missing Heels, which was awarded the Gunzo Prize for new writers in 1991. In 1993, she received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for The Bridegroom Was a Dog (which was translated by Margaret Mitsutani and published in English in 2003). She writes in both Japanese and German, and in 1996, she won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, a German award granted to foreign writers for their contribution to German culture. Where Europe Begins, a collection of stories translated from both languages by Yumi Selden and Susan Bernofsky, was published by New Directions in 2002.