(Post)-soviet / (de-)colonial: architectural constellations
Wednesday 30 November, 5pm-7pm
Loria 251a, Yale History of Art (190 York Street)
In this roundtable, Sofia Dyak and Michał Murawski discuss the colonial and post-colonial dimensions of architectural and urban development, focusing on case studies across times and places. They will address the question of whether postcolonial and decolonial optics are suitable for making sense of socialist and post-socialist architecture and urbanism; and will consider how this dimension manifests itself on the level of architectural aesthetics, urban governance, political ecology, infrastructure and everyday ideology.
Roundtable chaired by Marta Kuzma (Yale School of Art). Responses will be provided by Keller Easterling (Yale School of Architecture) and Craig Buckley (Yale History of Art).
Sofia Dyak
Dr. Sofia Dyak is a director of the Center for Urban History (Ukraine), an institution focusing on research, digital and public history, and educational programs. Her research interests include post-war history of border cities, heritage and urban planning in socialist cities and their legacies. Another area of her work is public history, including curating exhibitions and spatial commemorative projects in urban context. Dr. Dyak was a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Historical Dialogue and Accountability Program at Columbia University and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Currently she is also a senior research fellow at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam.
Michał Murawski
Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and cities. He is Associate Professor of Critical Area Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His first book, The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed was published by Indiana University Press in 2019; and he is currently working on completing his second book, a critical study of politics and architecture in post-Soviet Moscow. He is Director of the UCL SSEES FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity; and convenor of PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East), a seminar and events platform based at UCL. In Fall Semester 2022, he is a Visiting Fellow at the Yale School of Architecture
Sponsored By: REEES Program; Yale MacMillan Center; and Yale School of Architecture