Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Columbia GSAPP) is pleased to announce that Erica Avrami has been promoted to James Marston Fitch Associate Professor of Historic Preservation with tenure, effective July 1, 2024. Professor Avrami has taught courses in the School’s Master of Science in Historic Preservation program since 2010, and became a full-time professor in 2014. She also serves as an advisor in the Ph.D. in Historic Preservation program. Through her scholarship and teaching, Professor Avrami examines the role of historic preservation beyond individual buildings in order to consider heritage policy at social and environmental scales. Her work particularly focuses on the relationship between communities and their sites, and the intersections of social justice, equity, and climate in the context of preservation policy.

Professor Avrami directs the Urban Heritage, Sustainability, and Social Inclusion project, funded by the New York Community Trust, through which she launched the book series Issues in Preservation Policy, published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. These three books edited by Avrami – Preservation and the New Data Landscape (2019), Preservation and Social Inclusion (2020), and Preservation, Sustainability, and Equity (2021) – combine scholarly and community-based research and contributions to expand our understanding of the role and impact of preservation practice and policy as it responds to contemporary social and environmental needs. In 2024, she was appointed by President Biden as an Expert Member on the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation (ACHP), an independent federal agency that advises the President and the Congress on national historic preservation policy, and also served as the co-chair of the ACHP Expert Advisory Committee since 2023 along with Chair Sara Bronin. Previously she served as Director of Research and Education for the World Monuments Fund and as a Project Specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute. Professor Avrami’s research has led her to develop the concept of “second order preservation”, which involves acknowledging and unraveling the implications of first order policy decisions and is the subject of her forthcoming book, Second Order Preservation: Heritage Policy in the Crucible of Social and Environmental Change (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), in which she examines the broader impact of heritage policy on communities and environments, and the systemic biases they often perpetuate.

Professor Avrami’s research method is based on the process of co-learning and co-creating knowledge, in which she engages community members and collaborators across a range of disciplines and locations. She is particularly engaged with issues of racism and other forms of exclusion that are manifest in preservation education, which resulted in the collaborative project Building a Foundation for Action: Anti-Racist Historic Preservation Resources. She also served as vice chair of the Historic Preservation Anti-Racism Task Force, which aimed to address racism and other forms of exclusion across the historic preservation curriculum.

In her teaching, Professor Avrami shares her community-engaged research methods with students and creates opportunities for discovery and reflection through case-based learning in studios that explore the intersection of preservation and broader societal and environmental concerns – including social justice, environmental justice, sustainable urbanization, and climate resilience. A series of recent studios focused on Harlem and Morningside Heights, in which Avrami and her students engaged a large number of community-based organizations and explored how methods of preservation can be used to understand social-spatial relationships and how they can become tools to reverse patterns of exclusion in the built environment. Studio reports that document student work and research are regularly produced and generate lasting impact, including some that have been published by the World Monuments Fund.

In addition to her teaching at GSAPP, Professor Avrami is a research affiliate with the Columbia Climate School’s Center for Sustainable Urban Development, and co-directs the Adapting the Existing Built Environment Earth Network. In this context, her research focuses on increasing the understanding of the embodied energy benefits of older and historic buildings and anticipating the inevitable loss of place that will result from climate change.

Professor Avrami received a BA in architecture from Columbia College, a MS in Historic Preservation from Columbia GSAPP, and a Ph.D. in Planning and Public Policy from Rutgers University.