The intellectual core of the Princeton Mellon Initiative, the Mellon Forum is an ongoing, flexible colloquium for the discussion and critique of faculty, student and guest speakers' research. At the Forum, Faculty and students present their research, whether a design, model, film chapter, performance, or particular source or problem for discussion.
A different set of conveners organize each semester with themes which tap into fresh configurations of the University community to attract new energy. The Forum welcomes all disciplines. Forum events are free and open to the public.
See our Events page for more information.
Mellon Forum recordings of previous sessions are available here:
https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/category/3_Academics%3EPrinceton+Mellon+Initiative/202017273
Fall 2024 / ENTANGLEMENTS
The Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment is the core event series of interdisciplinary dialogs organized by the Fellows of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities.
The Fall 2024 Mellon Forum is sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, African Studies, Anthropology, Art & Archaeology, Brazil Lab, Center for Collaborative History, Chadha Global India Center, Effron Center for American Studies, English, French & Italian, High Meadows Environmental Institute, Humanities Council, PIIRS, Program in Latin American Studies, Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the School of Architecture.
All events are free and open to the public. Check individual event listings for more information.
September 11 / 12pm School of Architecture
Routes of Power: Transportation Technology and Socio-Urban Transformation in Early Modern Paris
Jennifer Strtak, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
Basile Baudez, Art + Archaeology
Scholars of the early modern period have traditionally accorded carriages a symbolic role in the historiography as material expressions of ostentatious display and social elitism. Yet these objects are captivating for more than the signifying prowess of their ornate exteriors. This talk, using a case study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris, reinterprets carriages as catalysts of profound social, political, and environmental changes. Drawing on legal records, financial accounts, guidebooks, and visual depictions of the capital, I reveal how the nobility and bourgeoisie’s adoption of vehicle technology physically embedded uneven power dynamics and social injustices into the city’s fabric. The erosion of walkable street space to accommodate wheeled traffic in the heart of the capital and the police’s use of carriages to covertly transport the city’s poor to prisons for colonial deportation illustrate how early modern vehicles emerged as contentious entities. The interaction between transportation technology and society in early modern Paris thus allows us to reconsider several key aspects of urban life: the enforcement of bureaucratic control, imperial expansion, socio-economic stratification, the development of city infrastructure, and the freedoms and constraints on everyday human movement.
September 18 / 12pm School of Architecture
South Africa’s Food Apartheid: Infrastructure and Everyday Urbanism in the Post-Colonial African City
Blessings Masuku, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
Hanna Garth, Anthropology
Over 2.6 million South African households have inadequate access to food, and 1.1 million households face a severe food shortage. This problem is particularly acute in major metro areas. This prevalence of food inadequacy varies significantly by gender, citizenship, region, and city. Informal food markets provide both access to food and are the primary source of income for over 70% of South Africa’s poor and marginalized urban populations. Yet informal food markets remain neglected by public policy and institutional funding. Building off a multimodal study in and around the city of Johannesburg, this talk will argue that achieving spatial justice, food justice and sustainable food security in the context of urban inequality and increasing climate variability are some of the most pressing challenges for the contemporary South African city.
October 2 / 12pm School of Architecture
Territories of Ambivalence: Architecture and Dictatorship in 1970s Brazil
Victor Próspero, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
Miqueias Mugge, Brazil Lab
Brazil lived under a far-right military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. This regime was deeply entangled with the construction industry, which was the basis of the so-called “Brazilian miracle” from 1968 to 1973: an economic boom based on authoritarianism and infrastructure developments throughout the national territory. The making of new infrastructures connecting the country and radically transforming its landscapes—with intense environmental impacts—was one of the major objects of the regime’s propaganda. Some highlights were the dictatorship’s discourse on fostering the Amazon “colonization” through its new roadways, or the advanced concrete technology used in cases such as the Rio-Niteroi bridge and the São Paulo elevated subway stations. This presentation will reflect on how the local architectural field (despite political orientation) was deeply entangled in the regime’s functioning. Its active participation in the making of a new built environment across the country is a revealing meeting point of antagonist political spectrums through modernization epistemologies. Moreover, the regime’s territorial planning and radical landscape interventions served as a reference for the architects’ imaginaries of “building territory,” constituting a central aspect of tension and ambivalence in the field’s political and disciplinary culture.
October 29 / 12pm School of Architecture
Against Architectures of Degradation: Pōhaku and Protection on Mauna Kea
Caitlin Blanchfield, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
Ikaika Ramones, Anthropology
This talk examines practices of erasure and resistance through the use of pōhaku (stone) on the Mauna Kea volcano Hawai‘i island, and within the boundaries of the Mauna Kea Science Reserve. Mauna Kea is a sacred site point of genealogical connection for Kānaka Maoli, it is also a contested landscape: Crown and Government land seized from the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1898, held in trust by the territorial and then state government, and leased in 1968 to the University of Hawai‘i to host an ever-expanding astronomy industry. Since the inception of the Mauna Kea observatories, Kānaka Maoli kia‘i (protectors) and environmental activists have resisted the increasing construction of large scale telescopes on Mauna Kea for both their degradation of the land and their violation of Hawaiian sovereignty. One way they have done that is through the built environment.
November 13 / 12pm School of Architecture
Toward a Third Monumentality: The Soviet Reception of Mexican Architectural Modernism
Da Hyung Jeong, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
Michael Brinley, History
This talk brings into dialogue two contexts that have tended to remain on the fringe of architectural historiography, namely Mexico and the Soviet ‘peripheries,’ or the non-Russian republics of the vast communist empire. After revealing striking analogies and parallelism—at the level of form, technique and undergirding discourse—between the new understandings of ‘monumentality’ (monumentalidad, monumental’nost’) that emerged in postwar Mexico on the one hand and in the margins of the late Soviet Union on the other, it will hypothesize a network of knowledge exchange from which the so-called ‘First World’ was deliberately excluded, one that sustained and nurtured an affective material culture expressive of postcolonial sentiments, desires and aspirations. The close copies of Mexican designs produced in Soviet Central Asia are, as will be argued, to be read as contrarian texts betraying a yearning for a critical regionalist alternative both to Western modernism, dismissed as irreconcilable with socialist culture, and so-called Soviet modernism, which was really a form of Russian cultural imperialism in disguise.
Spring 2024: TRANSFORMING LAND // MAKING PROPERTY
A discussion series curated by the 2023-2024 Princeton-Mellon Fellows
The Spring 2024 Mellon Forum interrogated the political economy of land to understand how the built environment comes into being. We invited scholars to consider how land in its multi-dimensional forms— e.g. property, territory, infrastructure, etc.— is made and remade, and what these contestations might reveal.
February 12 – Meghan Morris, Temple University, “Soil Forensics: Property and the Buried Truth in Medellín”
February 19 – Bikrum Singh Gill, Virginia Tech, “Against the Rule of Property: Violence, Land Reclamation, and Decolonization”
March 18 – “Dara Orenstein, George Washington University, “Escape from Liberty Island: Lower Manhattan Against the World, 1973-2001”
March 25 – Anne Bonds, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, with a response from John N. Robinson III, Princeton Assistant Professor of Sociology, “Propertied Power and Infrastructures of Resistance in the Urban North”
April 10 – Kristin Lee Hoganson, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “Structures of Power: Engineering Empire in the Circum-Caribbean”
Fall 2023 / SPACES OF BELONGING
A discussion series led by the 2023-2024 Princeton-Mellon Fellows
All sessions are held on Zoom and in Betts Auditorium, with registration links available on this website and our emails. Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. If you missed these sessions, visit Media Central to access the video recordings.
September 13 / 12pm EST / Land, Law, and Speculative Urban Futures
With Sheila Crane, UVA, and Gregory Valdespino, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
September 26 / 12pm EST / Womanist Work: Black Women Preachers and the Making of Sermonic Space in Literature and Music
With Melanie R. Hill, Rutgers, and Wallace Best, Princeton
October 2 / 12pm EST / 'Faith Shines Equal' / Airport Sublime
With Courtney Bender, Columbia, and Babak Manouchehrifar, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
October 25 / 12pm EST/ Spaces of Belonging: Three Propositions on the Relationship between Spatial Settings and Emotional Attachments
With Bishwapriya Sanyal, MIT
November 8 / 12pm EST / The Cost of Borders
Heba Gowayed, Boston University
Spring 2023 / SPATIAL STORYTELLING
A discussion series led by the 2022-2023 Princeton-Mellon Fellows
February 8 / 12pm EST /
With Elise Mitchell, Presidential Fellow, and Maria Taylor, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
February 14 / 12pm EST /
With Melissa Valle, Princeton-Mellon Fellow, and Fred Wherry, Sociology
February 27 / 12pm EST /
With Ralph Ghoche, Barnard, and PMI Fellows Babak Manouchehrifar and Greg Valdespino
March 6 / 12pm EST /
With Amir Sheikh, University of Washington, and Will Davis, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
April 4 / 12pm EST /
With Regner Ramos, University of Puerto Rico, and Mary Pena, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
April 11 / 12pm EST /
With Keisha-Khan Perry, UPenn, and Ana Ozaki, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
Fall 2022 / RACE EMPIRE ENVIRONMENT
A discussion series led by the 2022-2023 Princeton-Mellon Fellows
All sessions are held on Zoom and in Betts Auditorium, with registration links available on this website and our emails. Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. If you missed these sessions, visit Media Central to access the video recordings.
September 14 / 12pm EST / The Politics of Dwelling
With Gregory Valdespino, Princeton-Mellon Fellow, and Jacob Dlamini, History
September 21 / 12pm EST / Remapping Afro-Caribbean Landscapes
With Mary Pena, Princeton-Mellon Fellow, and S.E. Eisterer, Architecture
October 4 / 12pm EST / Palm Politics
With Will Davis, Princeton-Mellon Fellow, and Sigrid Adriaenssens, CEE
October 25 / 12pm EST / Of Milk, Blood, and Bones: Brazil’s Colonial and Postcolonial Plantation "Big House"
With Ana Ozaki, Princeton-Mellon Fellow, and Isadora Mota, History
November 2 / 12pm EST / Urban Greening and the Off-Modern
With Maria C. Taylor, Princeton-Mellon Fellow, and Allison Carruth, HMEI/AMS
November 8 / 12pm EST / Religion and the Politics of Space in Urban Planning
With Babak Manouchehrifar, Princeton-Mellon Fellow, and Seth Perry, Religion
The Mellon Forum is supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Princeton University Humanities Council, Center for Collaborative History, High Meadows Environmental Institute, Program in Latin American Studies, PIIRS, School of Architecture, and Departments of Art & Archaeology and English.
SPRING 2022 / Reframing Repair
All sessions are held on Zoom and in Betts Auditorium, with registration links available on this website and our emails. Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. If you missed these sessions, visit Media Central to access the video recordings.
The Mellon Forum is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Princeton University Humanities Council, Center for Collaborative History, High Meadows Environmental Institute, School of Architecture, and Departments of Art & Archaeology and English.
March14 / 12pm EST / Climate + Environmental Futures
With Rituparna Mitra, Emerson, and Joshua Moses, Haverford
March 23 / 12pm EST / Education + Urban Space
With Akira Drake Rodriguez, UPenn, and John Higgins, Princeton
March 30 / 12pm EST / Preservation
With Delia Wendel, MIT, and Salamishah Tillet, Rutgers
April 11 / 12pm EST / Reclamation
With Claire Herbert, Oregon, and Mariana Mogilevich, Urban Omnibus
FALL 2021 / Return
All sessions are held on Zoom and in Betts Auditorium, with registration links available on this website and our emails. Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. If you missed these sessions, visit Media Central to access the video recordings.
The Mellon Forum is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Princeton University Humanities Council, Center for Collaborative History, High Meadows Environmental Institute, School of Architecture, and Departments of Art & Archaeology and English.
September 22 / 12pm EST / Returning to the Lacustrine City in La Ciudad de México
With Vera Candiani, History, Princeton Mellon Fellow Dean Chahim, and HMEI/Princeton Mellon Fellow Seth Denizen
September 29 / 12pm EST / Architecture, Customs and Return in Lagos
With Adedoyin Teriba, Vassar, and PIIRS/Princeton Mellon Fellow Chukwuemeka V. Chukwuemeka
October 27 / 12pm EST / HighWaterLine: New Jersey
With Christina Gerhardt, HMEI, and Jerry Zee, Anthropology/HMEI
November 10 / 12pm EST / Coastal Worlds: Ecologies and Infrastructures in Western India
With Ryo Morimoto, Anthropology, and PIIRS/Princeton Mellon Fellow Chandana Anusha
November 17 / 12PM EST / Predatory Development and Climate Change
With Christina Jackson, Stockton, and HMEI/Princeton Mellon Fellow Davy Knittle
SPRING 2021 / Resistance
The Spring 2021 Mellon Forum is organized by Sophie Hochhäusl, Princeton-Mellon Fellow, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Assistant Professor in the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton University.
All sessions are held on Zoom, with registration links available on this website and our emails. Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. If you missed these sessions, visit Media Central to access the video recordings.
The Mellon Forum is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Princeton University Humanities Council, Center for Collaborative History, School of Architecture, and Departments of African American Studies, Art & Archaeology, and English.
February 17 / 4:30 PM EST / Urban Speculation // Queer Resistance
With Denice Frohman, Poet / Davy Knittle, UPenn / Malcolm Rio, Columbia / German Pallares, UPenn / Sophie Hochhäusl, Princeton Mellon Initiative
February 24 / 5:30 PM EST / Facing the Eviction Apocalypse
With Kendra Brooks, Philadelphia City Council / Rasheedah Phillips, Community Legal Services of Philadelphia
March 24 / 4:30 PM EST / Black Women and the Land Grab
With Sarah Broom, Writer / Carroll Fife, Oakland City Council / Keisha-Khan Perry, Brown / Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, African American Studies
April 14 / 4:30 PM EST / Environmental Exploitation // Indigenous Resistance
With Andrew Curley, Arizona / Sandy Grande, UConn / Desirée Valadares, Berkeley
FALL 2020 / What do “we” want the post-pandemic city to be?
This series of interactive sessions seeks to identify problems, present recent insights, and identify spaces of conflict and negotiation in the (post) pandemic city. Emphasis will be on how we might collaboratively design cities for the post-pandemic world. Topics will include phenomenology (how does the pandemic city present itself, what does it feel like?), public space and urban planning, the geography of the post-pandemic city, food security, shifting city/suburb/rural relationships, resilience, transportation, and international governance.
The Fall 2020 Mellon Forum is organized by Dietmar Offenhuber, Princeton-Mellon Fellow, and Anu Ramaswami, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute; Director, Chadha Center for Global India.
All sessions were held on Zoom, with registration links available on this website and our emails. Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. If you missed these sessions, visit Media Central to access the video recordings.
September 16 / 4:30 PM EST / Phenomenology and Data
With Jocelyn Frank, SoundSceneFest.org / Shannon Mattern, New School / Dietmar Offenhuber, Princeton Mellon Fellow
September 23 / 4:30 PM EST / Planning and Design
With Megan Maurer, Columbia / Destiny Thomas, Thrivance Group / Sarah Williams, MIT
September 30 / 4:30 PM EST / Food Security
With Tessa Desmond, Princeton / Ashley Gripper, Harvard / Thomas Reardon, Michigan State / Meredith TenHoor, Pratt Institute
October 4 / 4:30 PM EST / A Conversation with Mitchell J. Silver, Commissioner NYC Department of Parks & Recreation
With Marshall Brown, Princeton
October 21 / 4:30 PM EST / The Region Transformed
With Anthony Acciavatti, Yale / Yingling Fan, Minnesota / Marcel Negret, Regional Plan Association / Vonu Thakuriah, Rutgers
November 6 / 12:00 PM EST / The Geography of the Post-Pandemic City
With Sara Carr, Northeastern / Kirti Das, Princeton / Cindi Katz, CUNY / Jay Pitter, Author and Placemaker / Ashish Rao-Ghorpade, ICLEI / Craig Wilkins, Michigan / Anu Ramaswami, Princeton
SPRING 2020 / STAGED ENCOUNTERS: Embodiment, Architecture, and Urbanism
How does the built environment influence how we perceive race and national identity? How might design work for and against the disabled body? What are architectural design and urban planning’s political capacity in the twenty-first century? Staged Encounters privileges the site of the body (in its raced, gendered, and (dis)abled aspects) to think through the role of architecture and urbanism in the twenty-first century. It discusses how design, architecture, and spatial practices stage the body and, thus, impact how we frame and interpret social inequality.
The Spring 2020 Mellon Forum was organized by Kinohi Nishikawa, Department of English, and Ashlie Sandoval, Princeton Mellon Fellow. The Mellon Forum is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Humanities Council, Center for Collaborative History, Department of Art + Archaeology, Program in American Studies, and the School of Architecture.
February 18 / Space / Brandi Thompson Summers, UC Berkeley, and Ashlie Sandoval, Princeton Mellon Fellow
Urban space and Blackness exist as embodied realities and material relationships, but they can also be subject to aestheticization, representation, and abstraction. This opening session of the Spring 2020 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment will consider how the aestheticization or representation of Blackness and architectural design has impacted processes of urban renewal, designs for the urban environment, and the life conditions of Black communities. Panelists will consider the ways that aestheticization can serve to depoliticize the conditions of Black life, and also under what conditions aesthetics might be marshaled to respond to anti-Blackness within the built environment and urban design.
February 25 / Displacement / Jasmine Mahmoud, Seattle University, and Nora Akawi, Cooper Union
Displacement has been used to refer to the forcible removal of populations through militaristic, legislative, and financial acts. Displacement is also a process of forgetting, denial, and homogenization: forgetting who and what came before; a denial and (state, academic, and social) sanctioning of the violence of displacement; and a homogenization or flattening out of the multiplicity of subjects and agonisms that constitute a population, space, or state. This panel will consider how ritual and performance can serve as a response to survive or subvert acts of displacement, the ways in which architecture, urban space, or aesthetics are instrumentalized to produce dominating forms of national and racial identity as well as exclude those who are not represented by these hegemonic forms of life, and how notions such as “community,” “belonging,” or “memory” might influence or support processes of urban development and displacement.
April 9 / Disability / David Serlin, UC San Diego, and Bess Williamson, SAIC
Design’s relationship to disability is commonly discussed through the concept of universal design. However, the divergent approaches that operate under the term universal design point to the different stakes, ideologies, and politics that undergird design’s potential relationship to disability. The concept of universal design can be used to foreground disabled users and disability rights activism, drawing connections between the barriers faced by disabled users and the barriers faced by other spatially marginalized and excluded communities. Or the concept of universal design can steer away from disability-explicit design toward design for an imagined but unspecified “everyone.” In this conversation, the panelists will consider how an explicitly disability-focused design might differ from design that attempts to eliminate disability or build for an imagined “everyone,” and how the built environment might already reflect or challenge assumptions about the needs, abilities, life conditions, and desires of bodies.
April 14 / Citizenship / Ronald Rael, UC Berkeley, and Lauren Williams, College for Creative Studies
Design has been used to create divisions between and within countries, such as border walls, prison walls, and surveillance technology. Through these objects, design can define who does and does not have the privilege of citizenship, mobility, and access to family and resources. But design can also bring us together. It can provoke and facilitate satirical and theatrical responses across borders, such as the case with responses to the U.S.-Mexico border wall. It can also be used to directly address and combat social injustices and hierarchies. This session will consider how design and architecture might be used to change how we think of citizenship, the possible roles that designers, architects, and scholars can take up in response to divisionary or carceral designs, and how new forms or uses of design might challenge norms around race and national identity.
April 20 / Home / Rashad Shabazz, Arizona State University, and Maxine Griffith, Columbia University
As an ideological figure in American media and political rhetoric, home is often represented as a space of leisure and rest, as a place separated and distinct from work, and as a detached realm of community and private family morals. These ideological representations often mask the ways that property, housing, and the figure of the home were and continue to be impacted by racial covenants, housing discrimination, predatory lending, policing, and gentrification. This final session of the Spring 2020 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment will explore how we might bring different disciplines together (e.g. design intelligence, geography, Black Studies, and urban planning) to rethink how we access problems in the city and seek solutions, the ways housing policies, urban planning, and architectural design have made and unmade racial communities, and what effects new approaches to urban policy or the urban environment could have in undoing racially or economically inequitable urban landscapes and carceral geographies.
FALL 2019 / NARRATIVE
This semester’s topic was “Narrative,” addressing the different ways citizens, academics, and artists build stories on the urban environment. The series focused on the innovative and interdisciplinary methods to address the current and past crises that change the way we envision cities and architecture. Each seminar was devoted to the related sub-topics of Mapping, Unreal Cities, Divided Cities, Trauma, and Buffer Zones.
The Fall 2019 Mellon Forum was organized by Anne Cheng, Professor of English and Director of American Studies, and Basile Baudez, Assistant Professor of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional funding from the Humanities Council, Center for Collaborative History, American Studies, and Art & Archaeology.
October 8 / Trauma / Esra Akcan, Cornell University, and Valentina Rozas-Krause, UC Berkeley
November 5 / Unreal Cities / Dominic Pettman, The New School, and Gyan Prakash, Princeton University
November 19 / Divided Cities / V. Mitch McEwen, Princeton SoA, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Princeton University
December 3 / Buffer Zones / Keller Easterling, Yale University, and Tali Hatuka, Tel Aviv University
"Locating Politics" took up the rise and fall of recent uprisings as a springboard for examining a broader inventory and longer trajectory of spaces of contestation. We questioned the historical and emergent topologies of politics and their changing relations to race, migration, indigeneity, coloniality, and crisis. We asked how histories of sites of conflict, ranging from houses and streets to camps and prisons, might offer us not just understandings of different locations of politics, but of the overturning and re-bounding of the very limits of the political. The term location suggests both place (locus) and relational position, and it is to this intersection that this Forum spoke—where and with whom do we act politically today?
Organized by Princeton Mellon Fellows Nasser Abourahme and Noam Shoked, the Forum was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the Humanities Council, Center for Collaborative History, American Studies, Judaic Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Transregional Institute and Art & Archaeology. The Forum events began at 12PM and were held in the School of Architecture South Gallery.
February 6 / Settlement - Camp / Nasser Abourahme and Noam Shoked, Princeton Mellon Fellows
March 4 / Settler Colonial Urbanism: From Waawiyaataanong to Detroit at Little Caesars Arena / Andrew Herscher, University of Michigan, and Miguel Robles-Duran, Parsons School of Design
March 27 / Protest Camp - Holding Ground / Jaskiran Dhillon, The New School, and Candis Callison, Princeton
April 17 / Camp - Migrating / Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Barnard College, and Jacob Dlamini, Princeton
April 22 / Migration, Detention, Spatial Imagination / Sarah Lopez, University of Texas at Austin, and Vera Candiani, Princeton
April 24 / Seizing Jerusalem / Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and M. Christine Boyer, SoA
FALL 2018 / GENDER, JUSTICE, URBANISM
Organized by Alison Isenberg (History), Sheila Lin (SoA) and Ivan Lopez Munuera (SoA), the Forum events began at 12PM and were held in the School of Architecture South Gallery. The Forum was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Humanities Council and the Program in Gender & Sexuality Studies.
September 26 / "Away with Your Man-Visions": Gender as a Framework for Rethinking Housing and Urban Design" / Dolores Hayden, Yale University, and Dianne Harris, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
October 24 / “…A soaking, seeping, spatial politics” / Kian Goh, UCLA, and Kadambari Baxi, Barnard College
November 7 / "Just Space: Architecture, Education, and Inequality in Postwar Urban America" / Marta Gutman, CUNY, and Mónica Ponce de León, Dean, School of Architecture
November 14 / "The Way We Work" / Peggy Deamer, Yale University, and Alison Isenberg, Princeton
November 28 / "Maxixe in the Metropolis: Constructing Afro-Paulistano Respectability ca.1920" / Aiala Levy, Princeton Mellon Fellow, and Marília Librandi-Rocha, Princeton
SPRING 2018 / SENSORIAL URBANISM: The Aesthetics of Immateriality
The Spring 2018 Mellon Research Forum on the Urban Environment focused on how architecture and cities are mediated, experienced, and represented through seemingly immaterial means. Questions included, how do theories of neurophysiology and urban form shape the way we map the inner and outer world? How do microbial landscapes determine our moods, food processes and even configurations of whole cities? And how do the ways that we smell the streets, represent the city in color, and hear urban life change the way we embody and redesign the city? Panelists included architects, artists, scientists, designers and other scholars whose work seeks to unpack the aesthetic dimensions of immateriality in the city.
The Forum was organized by Evangelos Kotsioris (Architecture) and Phil Taylor (Art & Archaeology); events began at 5PM and were held in the School of Architecture South Gallery.
February 28 / NERVES / Lan A. Li, Columbia University, and Anthony Acciavatti, Princeton Mellon Fellow
March 28 / COLOR / Leslie Wilson, SUNY Purchase, and Katherine Bussard, Princeton
April 2 / MICROBES / Orkan Telhan, University of Pennsylvania, and Esther Choi, SoA
April 16 / SCENT / Joanna Fiduccia, Reed College, and D. Graham Burnett, Princeton
April 25 / MUSIC / Willem Boning, Arup, and Emily Thompson, Princeton
FALL 2017 / INFRASTRUCTURE & MATERIALITY
A growing body of contemporary research about infrastructure in architecture, the humanities, and social sciences takes as its object large-scale, seemingly immaterial infrastructures. Against assumptions about the invisibility of infrastructure, new scholarship accounts for the materiality of systems that range in time and scale from global networks and longue durée processes, to fleeting, microscopic phenomena. In working across different registers and sites, what possibilities and problems do work on materiality pose to theory, methods and critique? In order to understand this, our series created dialogues across disciplinary boundaries that focused on a particular material, including water, carbon, biota, cargo and building materials. In doing so, we explored how material shapes the possibilities for human worlds, be they social, political, religious, cultural, or otherwise.
The Fall 2017 research forum was curated by Andrew A. Johnson (Anthropology) and Curt Gambetta (Architecture). Events began at 12PM and were held in the School of Architecture South Gallery.
September 25 / BIOTA / Stuart McLean, University of Minnesota, and Peder Anker, NYU
October 9 / AIR / Erik Harms, Yale University, and Enrique Ramirez, Ball State University
October 16 / CARBON / Gökçe Gunel , University of Arizona, and Ateya Khorakiwala, Princeton Mellon Fellow
November 15 / CARGO / Jesse LeCavalier, NJIT, and Janell Rothenberg, UCLA
November 28 / BUILDING MATERIALS / Diana Martinez, Tufts University, and Catherine Fennell, Columbia University
December 6 / WATER / Nikhil Anand, University of Pennsylvania, and Mitch McEwen, SoA
SPRING 2017 / SEGREGATION, MIGRATION, & THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
In Spring 2017, the Mellon Forum for Research on the Urban Environment focused on Segregation, Migration, and the Built Environment. The Forum was organized by Sarah Lopez, Princeton-Mellon Fellow.
February 13 / Far from Sanctuary: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights / Allyson Hobbs, Stanford University, and Stacey Sinclair, Princeton
February 22 / Police and Infrastructure in the U.S. - Mexico Borderland / C.J. Alvarez, University of Texas - Austin, and Sarah Lopez, Princeton Mellon Fellow
March 1 / Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory / Charles Waldheim, Harvard University, and Rachael DeLue, Princeton
March 8 / Writing Atmosphere: Experiments in Spatial and Environmental Writing / David Gissen, California College of the Arts, and M. Christine Boyer, SoA
March 15 / What Does a Global History of Urban Segregation tell us about Global Urban History? / Carl Nightingale, University at Buffalo, and Jeremy Adelman, Princeton
March 27 / The Alien in our Midst: Memory, Displacement and the Making of our Everyday World / Arijit Sen, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, and Andrew A. Johnson, Princeton
FALL 2016 / THE NATURE OF CITIES
In Fall 2016, the Mellon Forum focused on The Nature of Cities, bringing together scholars to explore the complex and overlapping landscapes and ecosystems found in the urban built environment. The Forum was organized by Vera Candiani (History) and Elsa Devienne (Princeton Mellon Fellow).
September 21 / Coastal Resilience: Past & Present Perspectives / Andrew W. Karl, University of Virginia; Guy Nordensen, SoA; and Elsa Devienne, Princeton Mellon Fellow
September 28 / Globalization Meets Decolonization: The Urban Linkage, 1940s- 70s / Cyrus Schayegh, Princeton, and Ayala Levin, Princeton Mellon Fellow
October 12 / Imagining a Nonhuman Philadelphia / Alan C. Braddock, College of William & Mary, and Rachel Price, Princeton
October 19 / New York Botanical Garden Mellon Fellows / Robert Corban, Sahar Hosseini, Rachel Koroloff, Lynette Regouby, and Lauren Trahan
October 26 / The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 15 Years Later / Adam Rome, University at Buffalo, and Stan Allen, SoA
November 9 / The Lessons of 19th Century Boston Harbor / Michael Rawson, Brooklyn College, and Bruno Carvalho, Princeton
December 7 (postponed) / Perspectives on Urban Environmental History: The Case of Pittsburgh / Joel Tarr, Carnegie Mellon, and Vera Candiani, Princeton
FALL 2015 - SPRING 2016 / CITY AS HOME
In academic year 2015-16, the Mellon Forum for Research on the Urban Environment brought together scholars from varying disciplines to discuss City as Home - issues and themes ranging from Property, Belonging, and Family, to Housing, Habitation, and Futures were examined.
September 23 / Opening Plenary / Joao Biehl, Princeton; Mario Gandelsonas, SoA; Gyan Prakash, Princeton; and Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton
September 30 / The Color of Modernity / Barbara Weinstein, NYU
October 7 / J.B. Jackson's Vision of the City as Part of the Landscape / Helen Horowitz, Smith College, and Carla Yanni, Rutgers University
October 15 / Real Estate, Race, and Architecture / Andrew Sandoval-Strausz, Princeton Mellon Fellow, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Princeton
November 12 / Literature Between Home and the City / Lilia Schwarcz, Princeton
November 18 / Over the Ruins of Amazonia / Paulo Tavares, Princeton
November 23 / Latin America, Space, and the Cold War / Pedro Alonso, Princeton Mellon Fellow, and Jean Louis Cohen, SoA
December 3 / Inscribing Home in the City in Mexico and Colombia / Sebastian Ramirez, Princeton, and Pablo Landa, Princeton
December 11 / The Future of Public Housing / Leandro Benmergui, SUNY Purchase; Joseph Heathcott, Princeton Mellon Fellow; and Li Li, Xiamen University
February 25 / A woman's place? Rethinking Home in the Islamic City / Bridgett Purcell, Princeton, and Rachel Price, Princeton
March 7 / The Black Market as City: New Ressearch on Alternative Urban Space in Occupied Japan, 1945-52 / Kosei Hatsuda, University of Tokyo/Princeton, and Akito Sakasai, University of Tokyo/Harvard
March 23 / Beaches in the City / Elsa Devienne, Princeton Mellon Fellow
April 5 / The Color of War: Race, Neoliberalism and Punishment in Late 20th Century Los Angeles / Donna Murch, Rutgers University
April 12 / An Indigenous Woman's Map of the City: Indian Spaces in Progressive Era Washington, D.C. / Cathleen Cahill, University of New Mexico, and Martha Sandweiss, Princeton
April 21 / Paris Remade: Architecture, Planning, and the Post-Industrial Imaginary / Joseph Heathcott, Princeton Mellon Fellow, and M. Christine Boyer, SoA
April 28 / Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India'a Ancient River / Anthony Acciavatti, Princeton, and Pedro Alonso, Princeton Mellon Fellow
SPRING 2015 / DETROIT 101
February 26 / Art & Image / Judith Hamera, Princeton, and John Patrick Leary, Wayne State University
March 2 / Urbanism & Design / Maurice Cox, Director of Planning and Development, City of Detroit
March 11 / The Arts of Urban Transition / Oge Ude, Alexander Quetell, Lauren Wodarski (Princeton Undergraduate Students)
March 25 / Philanthropy & Public Policy / Don Chen, Ford Foundation
March 30 / History, Race & Real Estate / Thomas Sugrue, NYU; Dan Kinkead, Detroit Future City; and Jerry Paffendorf, Loveland Technologies
FALL 2014 / AMERICAN PLACES
The Fall 2014 Forum on American Places was convened by William Gleason, Chair of the Department of English and Bruno Carvalho, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures.
September 22 / Thinking Hemispherically about Cities / Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities Kickoff Event / Stan Allen, SoA; Fabrizio Gallanti, Princeton Mellon Fellow; and Alison Isenberg, Princeton
September 29 / Stadium Cultures in North and South America / Sigrid Adriaenssens, Princeton; Bruno Carvalho, Princeton; and William Gleason, Princeton
October 13 / Postwar New York / Mariana Mogilevich, Princeton Mellon Fellow; Aaron Shkuda, Princeton Mellon Initiative; and Zahid R. Chaudhary, Princeton
November 3 / Chocolate Cities and Vanilla Suburbs: Race, Space and American Culture After World War II / Eric Avila, UCLA
November 11 / Unequal Ties: Gilberto Freyre’s Recife and the Challenges of Urban History in the Global South / Brodwyn Fischer, University of Chicago
November 17 / Cities of Latin/o America: Culture, Policy, and Built Environments / Arlene Dávila, NYU; Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Rutgers University; and Johana Londoño, Princeton Mellon Fellow
December 8 / The Struggle for the Future of New Orleans / Josh Guild, Princeton, and Malik Rahim, Common Ground Relief