Despina Stratigakos to join Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton

Stratigakos, associate professor and interim chair of architecture, will focus her research on the massive construction schemes undertaken in Norway following Germany’s invasion in 1940 and what they reveal the National Socialist vision of colonial territories in the postwar world Adolf Hitler imagined. As part of her investigation, Stratigakos will examine Nazi plans for expanding Norway’s transportation infrastructure to integrate the country into the Greater German Reich, the reconstruction of Norwegian towns (supervised by Albert Speer), and Nordstern, Hitler’s vision of an ideal German city in the Norwegian fjords.

“Norway provides us with a unique view of what much of the world might have looked like had the Nazi regime succeeded in its global colonization plans: cities designed to enforce in their very structures Nazi ideology, vast transportation systems meant to move resources to the metropole, and special cities reserved for German occupiers, who would have ruled from their protected enclaves.  While it sounds like science fiction, this disturbing plan was partially realized in Norway, and remains a ghost presence in the Norwegian landscape.”

Founded in 1930 by education reformer Abraham Flexner, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton has served as a model for protecting and promoting independent inquiry, where members “conduct unfettered research based on free and deep thinking.” The institute’s community of scholars has grown to more than 7,000 historians, mathematicians, natural scientists and social scientists. Among its faculty and members are 33 Nobel Laureates (including Albert Einstein), 41 of the 56 Fields Medalists, and 15 of the 16 Abel Prize Laureates.

As a historian and writer interested in the intersection of architecture and power, Stratigakos has produced award-winning scholarship related to Germany, modernism, and 20^th-century architecture. In 2008, she released A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City, which retraces a real and imagined place of freedom carved out by women in the German capital a hundred years ago.  Stratigakos’s critically acclaimed Hitler at Home (Yale University Press, 2015) reveals how Hitler’s domestic spaces became part of the National Socialist cultural imagination and the basis of a propaganda campaign that shaped a softer image of the Führer in Germany and abroad.

Stratigakos has also published widely on issues of diversity in architecture. Her just-published book, Where Are the Women Architects? (Princeton University Press, 2016) uses the architectural profession as a lens into issues affecting women across male-dominated occupations, arguing that the emergence of a third wave of feminism in architecture provides opportunity for concrete change.