Adrian Anagnost Awarded ACLS Fellowship

“How can we historicize and globalize contemporary debates about architectural sustainability and ethical placemaking?” asks Adrian Anagnost, a professor of art history in Tulane's Newcomb Art Department. Anagnost's ongoing research on socially engaged work by contemporary artists has led to new questions about projects that aspire to democratic ideals through the use of vernacular architecture—architecture specific to a particular place and time, created by people who are not recognized as architects by professional organizations. “We think of vernacular architecture as rooted in a particular place. It is responsive to its physical environment and to local cultural traditions. In the mid-twentieth century, though, vernacular architecture lay at the heart of global architectural debates,” Anagnost continued. 

This spring, Anagnost was awarded a prestigious fellowship from the American Council on Learned Societies (ACLS) to continue this investigation, focusing on networks of architects and critics spanning Brazil and Italy. During her fellowship, Anagnost will begin research for a second book, expanding upon earlier research centered on ways that Brazilian artists and architects of the 1930s to the 1960s created works that critiqued, upheld, or intervened in urban Brazil’s socio-spatial inequalities. While conducting research for her first book project, Anagnost was drawn to the international circulation of architecture magazines and architecture exhibitions, and particularly noted parallells between Brazil and Italy.

[continue reading: Wilkerson, Emily, "Art History Professor Adrian Anagnost Awarded ACLS Fellowship," Tulane University School of Liberal Arts Newsletter, May 2019]