400 Avery Hall
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027
212.854.8165
buellcenter@columbia.edu
dsm2106@columbia.edu
2009 BUELL DISSERTATION COLLOQUIUM
Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation
New York, April 17-18
The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture invites submissions for its biennial Dissertation Colloquium, to be held on April 17-18, 2009, at Columbia University. This event brings together a select group of doctoral students working on dissertation topics related to the history, theory, and criticism of American architecture, urbanism, and landscape.
Ten to twelve students from universities worldwide will be invited to present a twenty-minute talk drawn from their dissertation research. The presentation should be based on a self-contained chapter or portion of the student's dissertation research, and should not be an overview or synthesis of the dissertation as a whole. "American" is construed to mean any part or aspect of the American continents, including all of North and South America. Comparative and cross-disciplinary approaches are encouraged.
Students must be enrolled in an accredited doctoral program and have completed their coursework and at least one year of dissertation research. Submissions should be emailed in PDF format and must include a complete draft of the intended presentation, with illustrations, by Monday, February 2, 2009. Submissions must also be accompanied by the following: a cover sheet specifying the student's institutional affiliation, the name(s) of the student's principal advisor(s), phone number, postal and e-mail addresses, and a 150-word abstract describing the paper's relationship to the overall dissertation topic.
Papers selected for presentation will be announced by March 1. Each participating student will receive hotel accommodation for two nights and funding toward travel expenses on an as-needed basis. A reception and dinner will follow the colloquium.
The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture is part of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The Buell Dissertation Colloquium has been held since the Buell Center's founding in 1982. Its purpose is to provide a forum for discussing significant new work by emerging scholars.
For further information and to submit your application please email:
Diana Martinez, Program Coordinator
Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture
dsm2106@columbia.edu
In some formulations of architectural history and theory Latin America endures as a category of analysis and as a delimited cultural territory. Alternative discourses resist the term Latin America; revisionist positions attempt to sweep away the residues of this grand narrative through the presentation of individual or singular experiences that reorganize connections and associations, and present new geo-cultural assemblies. Intra- and extra-regional networks, the emigration and immigration of ideas, architects and designers, the reorganization of the nation-state, the collapse of the politics of modernism, help to contest but also to reassert the idea of Latin America. The tension between these approaches to the architecture and urbanism of the "region" has rarely been critically examined. This conference calls upon scholars to situate their research in this contested geographical, cultural, political, and ontological imaginary called Latin America. It asks researchers to examine their work in relation to other possible geographies (pan, national, regional, or international zones of identification, or other imagined or repressed configurations) that help identify or dissolve, assert or disregard, manifest or negate, this simple yet haunting enunciation.