Stratigakos Symposium: Queer(ing) Space

The Symposium is the end result of a new, semester-long fellowship endowed by Despina Stratigakos, supporting research related to gender and sexuality in architecture. Thibodeaux's work will also culminate in a month-long exhibition featuring student-led interviews with six authors from the Stratigakos Collection as well as student work from three graduate seminars at the University at Buffalo, Princeton and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Adam Thibodeaux is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Architecture where he teaches core studios, graduate studios and seminars, and other courses focused on inclusive design and social justice. Adam Thibodeaux, UB clinical assistant professor of architecture, centers his teaching and research on the uncovering, preservation, and reclamation of architecture that once sheltered populations marginalized by difference. His work has focused primarily on buildings that once served as queer gathering spaces but whose histories have been masked. 

Julie Abraham teaches at Sarah Lawrence College in the department of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies. She holds a BA (Hons.) from the University of Adelaide, Australia as well as MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University. Special interest in lesbian/gay/queer studies, 20th-century British and American literature, contemporary feminisms, and literatures of the city; author of Are Girls Necessary?: Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories, Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities, and numerous essays; editor of Diana: A Strange Autobiography; contributor to The Nation and The Women’s Review of Books.

Harrison Apple (they/them/theirs) is the Associate Director of Carnegie Mellon University's Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and co-director of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project (PQHP). They received their PhD in Gender and Women Studies from the University of Arizona with a Doctoral Minor in Information Science. The PQHP is an oral history and media preservation initiative focused on working class LGBTQ histories through after-hours social clubs. Their research and arts practice is currently focused on the MS89 series, a live community watch party pushing back against the tendency to consume archives in solitude. MS 89 presents the PQHP archives as a social event to form new intergenerational friendships via our shared desire for a shared past. Their scholarship can be found in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Archivaria, and The Introduction to Transgender Studies.

Aaron Betsky is a Professor in the School of Architecture and Design at Virginia Tech. Previously, he was Director of the School and, prior to that, President of the School of Architecture at Taliesin. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Mr. Betsky is the author of over twenty books on those subjects. He writes a twice-weekly blog for Architect Magazine, Beyond Buildings. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Mr. Betsky has served as the Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), as well as Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he also directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture. His latest books are Fifty Lessons from Frank Lloyd Wright (2021), Making It Modern (2019) and Architecture Matters (2019). His Anarchitecture: The Monster Leviathan will be published by The MIT Press in 2023.

S. E. Eisterer is an Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. Her work focuses on spatial histories of dissidence, feminist, queer, and trans theory, as well as the labor of social and ecological movements. Currently, S. E. is completing two book projects: the interdisciplinary history and translation project Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Architecture of Collective Dissidence and the edited volume Living Room: Architecture, Gender, Theory. S. E.’s work has been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Humboldt Foundation, the Princeton-Mellon Initiative, and the Mellon Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in Architectural Histories, Architecture Beyond Europe, Log, Platform, Aggregate, and ARQ Ediciones, among other publications. In 2022, her co-edited volume with Erin Sassin States of Emergency was published by Leuven University Press and Cornell University Press. She studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and History of Architecture and Urbanism at Cornell University.

Malcolm Rio (he/they) is a Providence-based graphic and architectural designer and thinker. They are currently a PhD student in Columbia University’s Department of Architectural History and Theory. Their dissertation, tentatively titled "Architectural Ventriloquism," focuses on Haiti’s architectural production at a series of world’s fairs in order to analyze building projects and interiors where figures involved in the formation of a modern and transnational Black identity converged to articulate their position within an emerging imperialist capitalism. Rio’s scholarship, criticism, and interviews have appeared in Disc Journal, Thresholds, Avery Review, The New York Review of Architecture, ArchitectureMPS, and Pidgin, as well as in forthcoming books like Living Room, a volume on sexuality, gender, and architecture edited by Sophie Hochhäusl.

Joel Sanders, FAIA, is the founder of JSA/MIXdesign, an architectural studio and inclusive design think tank and consultancy dedicated to making everyday building types accessible and welcoming to people of different ages, genders, abilities, cultural identities, and religions. In addition to being Principal of JSA/MIXdesign, Sanders is a Professor at Yale School of Architecture and Yale School of Public Health, where he teaches classes that look at the intersection of architecture and mental and physical health. He is the author of three books— STUD: Architectures of Masculinity, Joel Sanders Writings and Projects and Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture. His projects have been featured in international exhibitions and are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMoMA, Cooper Hewitt, Art Institute of Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of Art.