Buell Dissertation Colloquium Keynote Address

Keynote address by Esra Akcan titled “Right-to-Heal: Democracy from Above and Below.”

The biennial Buell Dissertation Colloquium brings together a select group of doctoral students from diverse institutional and disciplinary backgrounds working on dissertation topics related to the history, theory, and criticism of American architecture, urbanism, and landscape.

Esra Akcan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and the Director of the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University. Akcan’s research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism foregrounds the intertwined histories of Europe and West Asia. She is the author of Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (Duke, 2012); Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion, 2012, with Sibel Bozdoğan) and Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA-1984/87 (Birkhäuse, 2018). Akcan has also authored over a hundred articles in scholarly books and professional journals of multiple languages on critical and postcolonial theory, modern and contemporary architecture in West Asia and its diasporas in Europe, architectural photography, immigration, translation, neoliberalism, globalization and global history. She received awards from the Canadian Center for Architecture, Graham Foundation, American Academy in Berlin, UIC, Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin (Transregional Studies Forum), Clark Institute, Getty Research Institute, CAA, Mellon Foundation, DAAD, KRESS/ARIT and Columbia University.

The Colloquium will continue on Saturday, May 4th, with a full day of presentations and panel discussions. For more information, see the 2019 Buell Dissertation Colloquium page here.

Image: View of Berlin-Kreuzberg, c. 1980. Photographed by Heide Moldenhauer.