Research Interests
My Ph.D. dissertation a study of how concepts of social purity and public health influenced art and aesthetics at the turn of the century in Europe and North America. For this project, I conducted extensive archival research in Berlin, New York and Montreal, uncovering unpublished documents in the history of medicine, architecture and social reform. My project focused on the visual and spatial expression of medical theory within the international hygiene movement and analyzed how this expression played out in creation of new architectural types for the working-class bathhouse (1840s until 1930). The substance of this project was a series of bathing structures designed in Berlin, which included the work of Ludwig Hoffmann, Heinrich Tessenow, Hans Poelzig and Martin Wagner. I developed comparative case studies in London, New York and Montreal. In this project it was particularly important to me to shed light on the theoretical underpinnings for the assertion that cultural forms have an impact on moral and physical health, an acknowledged claim of utopian Modernism and 1930s fascism, but also nurtured within nineteenth-century design strategies of Neoclassicism, Historicism, Empathy and Eclecticism. In addition, I was keenly interested in mapping the transnational and national hygiene movements through a series of interrelated architectural objects and their social spaces.
My work participates in current architectural historical scholarship that examines the emergence of Modernism from interdisciplinary perspectives. In addition to establishing a strong Old World-New World axis, my work examines architecture as part of a larger field of cultural production in which the history of medicine, engineering, and social reform play significant roles in the creation of the modern Body Politic. I am currently revising my dissertation for publication and am conducting addition research for this project on architects Heinrich Tessenow, Martin Wagner, and Alfred Lichtwark, a leader of the Art Education Movement in Germany.
Two side projects I am interested in draw from materials gathered during my dissertation research: an essay on graphic artist Heinrich Zille, and a theoretical investigation of the work of Foucault and Lefebvre and their relevance to the contemporary city.
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