Due to new guidelines for public gatherings issued by Penn in response to the coronavirus outbreak, this event was rescheduled to October 5 from its original date of March 18. Thank you for your understanding.
Esra Akcan is the Michael A. McCarthy Professor in the Department of Architecture and currently the Director of European Studies at the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. She completed her architecture degree at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and her Ph.D. and postdoctoral degrees at Columbia University in New York.She taught at UI-Chicago, Humboldt University in Berlin, Columbia University, New School, and Pratt Institute in New York, and METU in Ankara. Akcan received awards and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, Graham Foundation (3 times grantee), American Academy in Berlin, UIC, Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, Clark Institute, Getty Research Institute, Canadian Center for Architecture (2 times scholar), CAA, Mellon Foundation, DAAD and KRESS/ARIT.
Akcan’s research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism foregrounds the intertwined histories of Europe and West Asia, and offers new ways to understand architecture’s global movement, as well as its complicit or constitutive role in global, social and environmental justice. She is the author of Landfill Istanbul: Twelve Scenarios for a Global City (2004); Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (2012); Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (with S. Bozdoğan, 2012), Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzbergby IBA 1984/87 (2018) and Building in Exile: Bruno Taut in Turkey (with Bernd Nicolai, 2019). Her book Abolish Human Bans: Intertwined Histories of Living and Learning will be coming out from Canadian Center for Architecture in early 2021. Currently, she is editing the anthology Migration and Discrimination and working on her book Right-to-Heal: Architecture in Post-Conflict and Post-Disaster Societies. She has also guest edited three journal issues, and written around hundred-and-fifty articles and essays in multiple languages on critical and postcolonial theory, modern and contemporary architecture in West Asia and its diasporas in Europe, architectural photography, immigration, translation, globalization and global history.
Akcan’s lecture “Right to Heal: Architecture and Transitional Justice” will deliver research from her current work-in-progress.
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