Due to new guidelines for public gatherings issued by Penn in response to the coronavirus outbreak, this event was rescheduled to November 2 from its original date of April 1. Thank you for your understanding.
Sophie Hochhäusl is an Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and a member of the Executive Board for the program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. In the 2020-2021 academic year, Sophie will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at Princeton University and a Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities. She will also be the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Washington DC in the academic year 2021-2022. Before joining the Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, she was the Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Sophie is interested in discourse on collectivity, difference, and dissent in architecture. Her scholarly work centers on modern architecture and urban culture in Austria, Germany, and the United States with a focus on spatial histories of dissidence and resistance, intersectional feminism, queer theory, and gender studies, as well as environmental history and labor theory. Currently, she is working on two book projects: an interdisciplinary history and translation project titled Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Architecture of Collective Dissidence, 1918–1989 as well as the monograph, Housing Cooperative: Politics, Architecture, and Urban Imagination in Vienna, 1904–1934. Sophie is the co-editor of the forthcoming Architecture, Environment, Territory, Essential Writings Since 1850 with Daniel Barber and Irene Cheng.
Sophie has published articles and essays in academic journals including Architectural Histories, Architecture Beyond Europe, and Ediciones ARQ. Currently, she has forthcoming texts in Aggregate, Platform, and The Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians. In 2020 she was chosen to deliver the Detlef Mertins Memorial Lecture on the History of Modernity at Columbia University, which honors promising research in architectural history. She is the recipient of a Carter Manny Award by the Graham Foundation (2015) and the Bruno Zevi Award (2017) for the best historical-critical essay by an emerging scholar. Sophie’s research has been supported by the Botstiber Foundation for Austrian-American Studies, the Clarence Stein Fellowship for Landscape and Urban Studies, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, and the Viennese Mayor’s Office. In 2020 she was awarded the Perkins Holmes Undergraduate Teaching Award, based on nominations by her undergraduate students. In the same year she also won the inaugural Lynda S. Hart Teaching Award for a faculty granted by the Alice Paul Center and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
At the University of Pennsylvania, Sophie coordinates the undergraduate honors thesis in architecture in the College of Arts and Sciences and she is a member of the Graduate Group in Design. She co-organizes a Provost-sponsored Excellence through Diversity lecture series. Her Ph.D. students’ work spans topics including gender and kinship, housing and cooperative movements, architecture and literature, and urban culture in fin-de-siècle Vienna and modern Israel. Sophie deeply values collaboration in architecture and academic life. Her steady collaborators beyond the department at the University of Pennsylvania include Erin Cross (LGBT Center), Akira Drake Rodriquez (City and Regional Planning), David Hartt (Fine Arts), and Davy Knittle (English, Urban Studies). Sophie holds a Mag.Arch. from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University in History of Architecture and Urbanism.
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