Hannah Ahlblad is an architect and PhD student in the Theory and History of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and an A.M. candidate in the History of Science. During the 2026-2027 year, she will be a Graduate Student Associate of the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute.
Her research bridges spatial history and American foreign relations, with a focus on how Cold War nuclear physics, modernist architecture, and state-backed science programs reconfigured both local environments and global narratives of national sovereignty in the Indian subcontinent and Latin America. Using archival material across seven languages and multiple borders she engages in conversations on the politics of perception, architectural and scientific language, and networks of international technology transfer. She has written about the social impact of visible and invisible urban form in the U.S., Afghanistan, India, and Mexico for Texas Architect Magazine, ArchDaily, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, and The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design.
Hannah holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was awarded the E.D. Farmer International Fellowship and the UTSoA Travel Scholarship for field research on cognitive mapping and the legacy of integración plástica in Mexico City. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Art History and minor in Economics from Wellesley College.
Corinna Anderson is a third-year doctoral student in urban and architectural history. Their research interests center around the role of housing, land, and property in settler-colonial capitalism, with a focus on twentieth-century US history. Their previous work examines how tenant struggles have challenged property paradigms and shaped rent control policy historically; universities as colonial actors in land and housing markets; and the entanglement of the home and family form. Corinna holds an MA in Architectural History with distinction from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where their thesis addressed the “short-life house,” a prefabricated housing product designed by architect Cedric Price to accommodate the changing shape of the 1970s British family.
Corinna has worked in curatorial and editorial roles at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and most recently at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Their writing has appeared in Footprint, the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s What About the Provinces? issue, and Housing Perspectives. They hold a BA in Visual Arts and Mathematics from the University of Chicago.
Hugo Betting is a 6th-year PhD candidate, based in Evanston. His dissertation, titled “Nature and Nation: An Environmental History of Architectural Ideas in the United States, 1840-1940,” examines how the experience of changing environmental conditions shaped American architects’ understanding of national history.
He recently published an article about the Crystal Palace in Architectural Histories, and is preparing another one about the political perception of lichens’ agency on construction stones in the 19th-century United States. This year, he will be co-chairing a session at the College Art Association 115th Annual Conference held in New York, as well as presenting his work at the same venue and at the Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference held in Chicago.
In parallel to his research, he has developed and taught lecture courses in architectural history at Wellesley College (“Architecture and Urbanism in North America”) and in architectural theory at the Rhode Island School of Design (“Architecture and the Environment”).
Prior to arriving at Harvard, he was trained as an architect at the ENSA Paris La Villette (License Degree, Master’s Degree, Licensure) and worked as a project architect for various firms. He has also served as a studio instructor for the Harvard Design Discovery Program.
Nicholas Chung is a PhD student studying the histories and theories of architecture at Harvard University. He is interested in how pedagogical and research methods enabled repeated efforts to emulate outcomes of modernization, particularly across Eastern Asia throughout the twentieth century. Nicholas holds a Master’s in Design Studies from Harvard GSD (with Distinction), and a Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University (Summa Cum Laude with a minor in Geography). Prior to doctoral studies, he co-curated “From Utopia to Ubiquity” at the Yale School of Architecture (2025) and was the Curatorial Assistant for “Architecture’s Inscriptions” at the TANK Shanghai Art Museum (2026). Nicholas received the 2025 Dimitris Pikionis Award, and his design work has been presented at the Busan Architectural Festival (2022) and Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale (2021).
Jamie Centeno is a first-year PhD student whose research explores the evolution of American architectural vernacular in relation to urbanization and migration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She is particularly interested in stylistic counter-positioning as a way of examining how architecture can shape and contest ideas of who is recognized as “American”.
Jamie holds a Master of Architecture, and a dual bachelor’s in architecture and history from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Her thesis, Redefining Studentscapes: The Future of Outdoor Educational Learning, proposed innovative redesigns for K-12 outdoor learning environments in desert climates, with the goal of improving student mental health in underserved urban communities. The project received an AIA Merit Design Award, an AIAS Honor Award, and a Jeff Harnar in Contemporary Design.
Before beginning her doctoral studies, Jamie spent four years practicing in architecture firms and two years teaching architectural history and theory courses at UNLV. Her teaching emphasizes visual mediums such as sketching and collaging as tools for engaging with and communicating historical research. Alongside her teaching, she has led several curatorial initiatives in collaboration with local architectural firms and cultural institutions, including the Neon Museum, to showcase student work.
Samira Daneshvar is an environmental historian and theorist who works at the intersection of science, media, and technology. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Thinking with Things: A Matter of Objects in the Science of Radiation (1895-1899),” which is an intellectual history of the detection of new properties of matter alongside the discovery of new forms of radiation. She shows how shadow pictures, produced by innovative techniques of visualization, turned ordinary objects into wonders of scientific inquiry, ultimately giving rise to the conceptualization of matter as porous and permeable to environmental influences. Her doctoral research has been supported by the Berlin Program for Advanced European Studies at Freie Universität, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Historical Epistemology of the Final Theory Program), the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, the Deutsches Museum, the Chateaubriand Fellowship, the Harvard University Merit Fellowship, and a Film and New Media Grant from the Graham Foundation.
Samira holds a Master of Arts in History of Science from Harvard University, a Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto, and a Master of Science from the University of Michigan. She undertook historical studies in the arts and humanities after completing five years of medical school. Her writings have appeared in Winterthur Portfolio, Thresholds Journal, Informa, Inflection Journal, and Centre. She has exhibited her work at the MIT Keller Gallery, Fashion Art Toronto, the University of Texas at Austin, and Carleton University. She has also curated an exhibition with the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.
Romain David is a PhD candidate in Theory and History of Architecture. In his dissertation, he investigates the intersection in the 1990s between architectural neo-avant-garde firms and transnational networks of expertise from the development era. He is a micro-global historian and led archival research in Thailand, Nigeria, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States.
Romain holds a BA in cinema studies from Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle and a BA and MA in architecture from l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette. In 2018, he received the Prix du Mémoire de Master en Architecture from the Fondation Rémy Butler. His research has been supported by the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montréal, the Harvard University Asia Center, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Merit-Term, and the Arthur Sachs Fellowships.
Hayley Eaves studies the theory and practice of theatre and theatricality in early modern European architecture and urban space. Her dissertation attempts to recover and restore fragmented knowledge on the artistic and constructional achievement of freestanding theatres, immersive sets and illusion-driven technologies for theatre.
Prior to matriculating to Harvard, Hayley completed her B.A. and M.A. degrees in art history at McGill University. Her master’s thesis on the Tiepolo family of draftsmen, decorators, and painters introduced the theory of pastoralesque, a play on the pastoral genre in art and literature and Mikhail Bakhtin’s influential carnivalesque. Hayley characterizes representations of commedia dell’arte street performers in the countryside as pastoralesque, their presence significantly altering the natural landscape from a locus amoenus (delightful place) to a second carnival.
Hayley will be leading an undergraduate seminar on Renaissance and Baroque architectural and stage design practice for theatre during the fall. She is a Research Tutor in the Master of Design Studies Program (Narratives) and a Research Assistant for Professor Christine Smith.
Morgan Forde is a sixth-year PhD candidate in Urban Planning and splits her time between Washington DC and Cambridge. She was a 2025-2026 Totman Fellow (Black Washington) at the DC History Center, and her work has been supported by the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative and the Pforzheimer Fellowship with Harvard University Libraries. Her dissertation focuses on Black American urban history in the 20th century with a particular focus on Resurrection City, a project led by the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, DC in the summer of 1968.
Morgan holds an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies with distinction from the University of Cambridge and a bachelor’s degree in International Politics and Security Studies from Georgetown University. Formerly a journalist and editor, her work has been featured by: the Getty Conservation Institute, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Mic, Ploughshares, Popular Mechanics, the United Nations Foundation, and elsewhere.
Charlie Gaillard is a fourth-year PhD student in the History and Theory of Architecture. His research deals with nineteenth-century American architecture and civil engineering, focusing particularly on transportation systems. By studying the new and hybrid structures that took shape alongside these systems, Charlie aims to investigate architecture’s changing role in an increasingly urbanized and networked society.
Charlie holds a Master in Design Studies from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Art History and English from Williams College. Prior to earning his Masters degree, Charlie worked as a strategist at the New York design consultancy 2×4 before joining the GSD’s Office for Urbanization (OFU). There, he contributed to design research projects on mass transit, climate change adaptation, and new town planning. With Charles Waldheim and OFU, Charlie co-authored 50 Species-Towns, a 2022 publication that presents a speculative approach to rural urbanization in China. Charlie lives in Somerville, MA with his wife Cat and sons Paul and Bobby.
Swarnabh Ghosh is a geographer and historian with two interrelated sets of research and teaching interests: (1) the political economy and ecologies of urbanization and (2) the historical geography of capitalism and its infrastructures from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, with an empirical focus on South Asia. His dissertation examines the entwined geographies of fossil energy, perennial irrigation, and agrarian capitalism in northwestern India—and the western Indian Ocean region—from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries.
He has published extensively on the economic, environmental, and energy geographies of capitalist urbanization and on methodological questions in the historical social sciences. He is currently working on a research project with Neil Brenner on the relationship between urbanization, fossil energy, and biospheric collapse in the long twentieth century. His broader research interests include critical social theory, agrarian political economy, science and technology studies, and the history of economic thought.
Swarnabh is a research affiliate of the Urban Theory Lab, formerly based at the Harvard GSD, currently based at the University of Chicago. His recent work has appeared in Critical Historical Studies, Development and Change, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, and the Journal of Agrarian Change.
Swarnabh received a Master of Philosophy in Urban Studies (with distinction) from the University of Cambridge, where he studied as a Bass Scholar, and a Master of Architecture from Yale University. Before starting his PhD, Swarnabh worked at the interdisciplinary studio Diller Scofidio and Renfro in New York City.
Claire Gorman Hanly is a first-year PhD student with research interests in environmental computation and regional planning. Contextualized by a technical background in computer vision for earth sensing, her work critically explores the creation of environmental data and its uptake into systems of resource governance and value production. She examines these topics both historically and in the present, tracing the evolving regimes of calculation and prediction that underpin contemporary representations of the environment, such as those implicit in nature markets or geospatial AI.
Claire’s work ranges methodologically across computation, curation, archival studies, and tool-building. Spatially, it seeks out the signatures of urban information structures not only in cities but in farmland, managed wilderness, and regional resource-sheds. She has collaborated on artwork with Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, on crop sensing with ag-tech startup CIBO Technologies, on urban research with MIT’s Senseable City Lab, and on cultural landscape analysis with the US National Park Service. Recent research supported by MIT’s Morningside Academy for Design took her to the bogs of Northern Ireland, where she studied the social and informatic frameworks driving investment in carbon markets for peatland restoration.
Claire served as Principal Assistant to the Curator for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia 2025. She holds a Master of City Planning and a Master of Science in Computer Science from MIT, and a BA in Computing and the Arts from Yale University.
Matthew Kennedy is a fifth-year PhD student in architecture and urban history. His research currently focuses on architectural and material cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on Latin America in the half-century span between the 1929 onset of the Great Depression and the Debt Crisis of 1982. He is especially interested in networks and institutions that facilitated the mobilization of material sciences, construction techniques, aesthetic values, sociopolitical imaginaries, and different theories of economic development during this period, and the ways in which nominally modern architecture and urban planning practices were drawn into their endeavors. His work draws on methodological tools from political, economic, and environmental history, as well as the history of science and technology.
Matthew is a co-founder of the Mexico City-based art, design, and research practice Cosa, and has previously worked in architecture practices including Studio Frida Escobedo, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, and The Fautory. He is the assistant editor of the architectural research journal Faktur: Documents & Architecture, which has been the recipient of multiple grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. His book, The Advanced School of Collective Feeling (Park Books, 2023), explores the origins of modern physical culture and its interplay with modern domestic architecture between in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. Matthew holds a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation.
Gabriel Kozlowski is the founding partner of POLES – Political Ecology of Space, an architecture and research studio operating between Rio de Janeiro and Boston, focused on the spatial politics of territory, landscape, and environmental transformation.
He has contributed to the curatorial development of major international exhibitions, including as Head of Design and Construction of the 2025 Venice Biennale Intelligens. Natural, Artificial, Collective; Assistant Curator of the 2021 Biennale How Will We Live Together?; Co-curator of the Brazilian Pavilion at the 2018 Biennale Freespace; and Design Curator of Housing+ at the 3rd Triennale of MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism.
His publications include Tomorrow Anew (Gryphus, 2023), The World as an Architectural Project (MIT Press, 2020), 8 Reactions for Afterwards (RioBooks, 2019), and Walls of Air (Bienal de São Paulo, 2018).
At MIT, he held teaching and research positions across the School of Architecture and Planning, the Center for Advanced Urbanism, and the SENSEable City Lab. He is currently a PhD candidate at Harvard University, where his research examines the Amazon region as a long-term, anthropogenic urban landscape shaped through successive regimes of territorial production.
Gabriel leads ForestGens, a critical cartographic initiative mapping the spatial imprint of human activity across ancient and contemporary Amazonia.
Isaiah Krieger is a third-year PhD student in the history and theory of landscape architecture. His research examines the relationship between landscape visualization and scientific style, drawing on methods and discourse from both art history and the history of science. He is particularly interested in tracing recurrences of the picturesque and other historical landscape aesthetics through recent and contemporary modes of landscape visualization, in contrast to the formless and diffuse notion of landscape inherited from postmodern theory. His current work juxtaposes the picturesque landscape tradition with the imaging conventions of NASA’s Mars rover missions.
Isaiah has professional experience at landscape architecture firms in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, where he worked on a wide variety of public, private, and infrastructural projects. He holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a BA in history from Northeastern University.
Anny Li is a fourth-year PhD student studying landscape and environmental history, with a secondary field in the history of science. Her research focuses on the connections between US environmental management, its attendant media practices, and the expansion of US empire in the late 19th and early 20th century.
She holds a Master in Design Studies in History and Philosophy of Design and Media with distinction from Harvard GSD, where her thesis on the history of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plant introduction program won the 2022 Design Studies Thesis Prize. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked on communications and publications at Snøhetta and exhibitions and programs at Houghton Library. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University.
Sunghwan Lim is a licensed engineer in architecture and building facilities. He is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Architecture, concentrating in Architectural Technology, advised by Professor Ali Malkawi. His research focuses on sustainable and high-performance building technologies, with particular interests in energy simulation, natural ventilation, and HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning) system studies. Sunghwan is currently working on developing innovative building control systems and increasing the potential of natural ventilation at the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities.
Sunghwan earned his Master in Design Studies (MDes) degree in Energy and Environment from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2021. He received the Dean’s Merit Scholarship during his study and his master’s thesis, entitled Controlling Wind Pressure around Building by Multiangle Ventilation Louver for Higher Natural Ventilation Potential, was awarded to Daniel L. Schodek Award for Technology and Sustainability from Harvard Graduate School of Design and top student paper (Doctoral Level) from the 2023 ASHRAE Winter Conference.
Before joining the Harvard community, Sunghwan double majored in Interior Architecture & Built Environment and Architecture & Architectural Engineering at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. After receiving his bachelor’s degree, Sunghwan worked as a construction engineer at Samsung Construction and Trading company for six years. His invaluable experiences with building an airport in Mongolia and constructing a residential complex in Seoul profoundly shaped his research ideas and motivated him to contribute to the field of architecture.
Samuel Maddox is a second-year PhD student in Regional and Environmental Planning. His research examines how ecological systems, regional governance, and economic policy frameworks can guide more equitable and adaptive rural development. Drawing on political ecology, he studies how identity, environmental management, and economic transitions shape the social and ecological futures of small towns and working landscapes, particularly in the American South and Western Europe. He holds an MDes in Urbanism, Landscape, and Ecology from Harvard GSD and dual bachelor’s degrees in Architecture and Interior Architecture from Auburn University, where his Rural Studio thesis advanced regionally scalable affordable housing through the 20K House project.
Before beginning his doctorate, Samuel served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology and an adjunct faculty member at the Boston Architectural College. At Wentworth, he taught across the curriculum, directed the FutureLab, led the design-build outreach program summerFAB, and co-founded the Environmental Action and Social Equity (EASE) curriculum committee. His studios in the Alabama Black Belt and Italy’s Marche region—part of a semester abroad curriculum in Urbino—used fieldwork, policy analysis, and spatial justice frameworks to explore rural development vis-à-vis cultural heritage, labor geographies, agroecology, and migration. At the BAC, Samuel taught in the Design for Human Health master’s program as well as advanced studios, representation courses, and history and theory seminars.
A licensed architect, Samuel’s practice spans housing, adaptive reuse, and public art. His built works include Leviathan (2023), a large-scale installation along the Atlanta BeltLine, and Changing Perspective (2019), a public artwork in Jacksonville, Florida, that reorients and guides cyclists through local spatial narratives of Black history and contested urban memory. Samuel’s research and writing appear in UCLA’s Critical Planning, Yale’s Paprika!, the Harvard Urban Review, the Kennedy School’s LGBTQ Policy Journal, and Care and the City: Encounters with Urban Studies (Routledge, 2021).
Adil Mansure is a PhD student at the GSD/GSAS interested in maritime histories of technology, architecture, and the environment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His current research traces the cultural and material histories of rope within British maritime worlds—on the mainland, at sea, and across encounters with Indigenous practices in the Indian and South Pacific Oceans. Previously, Adil was the H. Allen Brooks Traveling Fellow in 2022 (funded by the Society of Architectural Historians) where he pursued an oral history project exploring how architectural information is carries through the stories of various Indigenous peoples of North-Western Canada. He has also worked on the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini, co-edited Finding San Carlino: Collected Perspectives on the Geometry of the Baroque (Routledge 2019), as well, curated the traveling exhibit Instrumentalies of an Eternal Baroque, in which he pursued a ‘History and Theory via drawing and making’ method of historical inquiry. Adil has previously taught both studios and seminars at the University of Toronto, the University at Buffalo, Wenzhou-Kean University, OCAD University, and Laurentian University; and worked in architecture studios in Toronto, New York, and Mumbai. He holds an M.Arch II from Yale University, an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies from the University of Cambridge, and a B.Arch from Mumbai University.
Sarah Moses is a sixth-year PhD candidate whose recent work examines segregationist projects at beachfront leisure sites in the United States as attempts to spatialize race—to materialize ideas about race in space—and to racialize space—to make Black users experience disparate treatment in their movement across space, through surveillance, bars to access, and dictates of decorum. Prior to her enrollment at Harvard, Sarah was a public historian for the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission where she wrote about lesser-known episodes in New York City’s past.
Her chapter about Denise Scott Brown’s work with a Black citizens’ committee to oppose a destructive expressway development in Philadelphia appears in Frida Grahn, ed. Denise Scott Brown: With Others’ Eyes.
Sarah holds both Master of Architecture and a Master of Science in Historic Preservation degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where the focus of her research was conflict between the collective desire to memorialize and the protective impulse to stigmatize, sanitize, or obliterate sites with traumatic or violent associations. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts in fine arts from Yale University. She splits her time between Cambridge and Edinburgh.
Lindsay Blake Saftler is a third-year PhD student in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning. She is interested in histories of computing, networks, and governance; the politics of urbanization; critical theories of capitalist society. Her work tracks how policymakers and planners in the United States leveraged existing infrastructure and policy frameworks to roll out broadband access in cities.
With support from the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, her most recent project examined labor relations in New York City during Prohibition.
Before pursuing graduate studies, Lindsay worked as a strategist in media and telecommunications. At Harvard, Lindsay has served as a research assistant for various faculty at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
Lindsay holds a Master in Design Studies with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a B.A. with honors in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. She lives between Cambridge and New York City.
Miranda Shugars is a fourth-year PhD candidate studying historic preservation and tourism in late twentieth century Havana, Cuba. Her primary advisor is Diane Davis.
Prior to the PhD program, Miranda taught integrated and graduate-level studio courses as a Visiting Professor of Practice at Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture. She also developed a course on mapping and GIS with a regional focus in Appalachia which won the ACSA / Temple Hoyne Buell Center’s 2023 Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society.
Before teaching, she worked as a licensed architect at RODE Architects in Boston, MA on the largest supportive housing project north of New York City, as well as flood-resilient, Passive House, and community-oriented projects. She has also worked at firms in Boston and New York specializing in affordable housing, historic preservation, and adaptive reuse.
She holds a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and an undergraduate degree in visual and studio art from Harvard College.
MS Srinivas is a third-year PhD student in the history and theory of architecture. His research is focused on architecture and visual culture associated with discourses of imperialism, nationalism, and world order in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the context of the Round Table movement and the British empire. He is also interested in histories of cemeteries and memorials and, more generally, the relationship between architecture, political thought, and collective identity. In earlier research, he has examined the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission in the years after the First World War, which received a dissertation prize from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB).
MS trained as an architect at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and acquired an MSc in architectural history and theory at the University of Edinburgh as a Hamish Ogston Foundation Commonwealth scholar. His previous experience includes architectural design and research projects in India, including a museum project for the Archaeological Survey of India. His research has been published in the journal Architectural History.
Kim Võ is a second-year doctoral student in the Theory and History of Architecture. He focuses on the negotiation between modernization and museification of the built environment in the nineteenth-century Italian peninsula; the historiographic disjunction between textual records and material evidence derived from excavations and expeditions in Europe; and the influence of scientific observation techniques and documentations on the modern practice of architecture. He has also worked on topics related to European book history, archaeology, museology, botany, Italian paintings and sculptures, and the representation of the human body in European art and science.
Kim holds a Master in Design Studies (Narratives) with distinction from Harvard GSD. He received professional training in architecture at the Hồ Chí Minh City University of Architecture, Vietnam, and a Master of Architecture at the University of Melbourne, Australia. At the University of Melbourne, he assisted with coordinating the first-year design foundation course and co-instructed master-level architecture design studios.
Yifei Zhang is a second-year PhD student studying the history of architecture and landscape. His research examines the interaction between architecture and landscape across and along the English Channel during the long nineteenth century. His most recent work includes the afterlife of Roman “naumachia” in the late 18th century, visual representations of geology in Victorian public life, and landscape drawings in the sketchbooks of Gothic Revival architect A.W.N. Pugin. Yifei’s work has been supported by Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and his writing appears in Scroope, Architecture as Built Criticism (Park Books, 2025), and The Avery Review as the First Place winner of its 2024 Essay Prize. He also has a forthcoming article in Nineteenth-Century French Studies on iconoclasm during the Paris Commune. Yifei has presented his research at the Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference, the UCLA Art History Graduate Symposium, and the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, among others. Before doctoral studies, Yifei obtained a Master’s in Design Studies with distinction from the GSD, during which he received the Design Studies Domain Award, and served as a Teaching Fellow for Harvard Undergraduate Architecture Studies. Prior to Harvard, he received a Bachelor of Architecture and a BA cum laude in Architecture and French Studies from Rice University.
Ziwei Zhang is a seventh-year PhD candidate in Urban and Regional Planning, specializing in environmental policies and regional development. Engaging with political ecology, her ongoing dissertation investigates how China’s rural revolutions and reforms have shaped the interplay between the environment and rural society, through a detailed case study of a tea county. She has presented her academic work at conferences across various disciplines, including geography, history, agrarian studies, and China studies. Her research is supported by multiple centers and institutions, including Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and Frederick Sheldon fellowship. In addition to her primary research in China, she is involved in projects in Indonesia and Mexico, addressing land tenure, resource management, and institutional building. She has published papers in Journal of Agrarian Change and Landscape Architecture Frontiers. She is currently a traveling fellow, now based in DC area.
Ziwei holds a Master in Landscape Architecture, a Master in Design Studies in Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), and a Bachelor of Architecture from Southeast University, China. She has also experience as an urban designer for one year for Stoss Landscape Urbanism, where she participated in projects in China, the U.S., and the United Arab Emirates.