Society of Architectural Historians Names the 2021 Class of Fellows

L–R: Zeynep Çelik, Lynne Horiuchi, Karen Kingsley, Steven Nelson, and Mabel O. Wilson

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The Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to name Zeynep Çelik, Lynne Horiuchi, Karen Kingsley, Steven Nelson, and Mabel O. Wilson as SAH Fellows, one of the Society’s highest honors. SAH Fellows are individuals who have distinguished themselves by a lifetime of significant contributions to the field. These contributions may include scholarship, service to the Society, teaching and stewardship of the built environment. The 2021 SAH Fellows will be recognized during an awards ceremony that will take place during the SAH 2021 Virtual Annual International Conference.

“It is with great pleasure that we announce our five new Fellows of the Society of Architectural Historians,” said SAH President Victoria Young. “They represent a breadth of approaches to the field, and I am truly grateful for the extraordinary service they have provided not only to the Society, but also to the study of the built environment more broadly.”

Zeynep Çelik

Zeynep Çelik (BArch Istanbul Technical University; MArch Rice University; PhD University of California, Berkeley) is distinguished professor emerita at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and adjunct professor of history at Columbia University. Celik's  publications include The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (1986)—winner of the 1987 Institute of Turkish Studies Book Award, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs (1992), Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space (1993—co-editor), Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (1997), Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830–1914 (2008—winner of the 2010 SAH Spiro Kostof Book Award), Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City through Text and Image (2009—co-editor), Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 (2011, co-editor) Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840–1914 (2015—co-editor), and About Antiquities: Politics of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire (2016). Her most recent publication is Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient: A Critical Discourse from the East, 1872–1932 (published in Turkish in Fall 2020; forthcoming in English in Spring 2021). Celik also served as the editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2000–2003) and wrote numerous articles on cross-cultural topics. She co-curated Walls of Algiers at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (May–October 2009), Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 at Salt, Istanbul (November 2011–March 2012), and Camera Ottomana at Koç University (2015). Her current research focuses on transformations to Middle Eastern cities from the late Ottoman to the early Mandate eras. She is also co-curating an exhibition, Palestine from Above, for the Qattan Foundation, Ramallah, West Bank. Professor Çelik has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2004), the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (1992, 2004, and 2011), the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2012), Doctor Honoris Causa (Bosphorus University, 2013), Vehbi Koç Award (Istanbul, 2013), the Sarton Medal (Ghent University, 2014), the Giorgio Della Vida Award (UCLA, 2019), and the Tamayouz Award (2019).

Lynne Horiuchi

Lynne Horiuchi is an independent scholar who received her PhD in 2005 from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She has published numerous articles on the built environments of Japanese American incarceration. Race, space, architecture, and ethics are her theoretical interests crossing over into Asian American studies, art history, vernacular architecture, urban planning, and critical race studies. She has co-edited a volume with Tanu Sankalia, Urban Reinventions: San Francisco’s Treasure Island, that examines the complete transformations of a man-made island for a world exposition, a military base, and a new neighborhood in San Francisco. She is co-writing with Anoma Pieris a volume on imprisonment during World War II from Singapore to North America, The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War. She is completing a volume, Dislocations and Relocations: The Planning, Design, and Construction of Prison Cities, that interrogates the relationships between architecture and vernacular building and military design and construction. She has received numerous awards including NEH grants and a Civil Liberties Public Education Fellowship and was named a National Endowment for the Arts MacDowell Fellow. She has taught at the University of North Carolina in the Department or Architecture, and she is currently developing a course on race, redevelopment, and gentrification for the Future Histories Lab at the University of California at Berkeley. She has served on the board of the Rosie the Riveter Trust and numerous other community organizations and committees. She is a long-time member of SAH, participating in conferences, panels, and roundtables, and is currently the co-chair of the SAH Minority Scholars Affiliate Group and a member of the SAH IDEAS Committee.

Karen Kingsley

Karen Kingsley immigrated to California from the United Kingdom in the late 1960s. She earned a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980, while raising two children. After teaching at Virginia Tech from 1977 to 1980, she moved to New Orleans and taught architectural history at Tulane University’s School of Architecture, retiring in 2005 as professor emerita. While at Tulane, she also served from 2002 to 2005 as director of the Southeastern Architectural Archive, for which she organized several exhibitions. In 2006, Kingsley was appointed editor-in-chief and managing editor of the Society of Architectural Historians’ award-winning Buildings of the United States (BUS) series, with a phased retirement starting in late 2020. She has also been an editor for SAH Archipedia, the Society’s online encyclopedia of the history of the built environment in the United States. In the early twenty-first century, Kingsley led architectural tours of New Orleans, including one for SAH in 2004. She has also served on the boards of two SAH chapters: the Southeast Chapter and the Latrobe Chapter in Washington, DC (where she currently resides).

Kingsley has published widely on Southern architecture, including Buildings of Louisiana (Oxford University Press, 2003) and Buildings of New Orleans, which she co-authored with landscape historian William Lake Douglas, and was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2018. She co-authored with Guy W. Carwile, The Modernist Architecture of Samuel G. and William B. Wiener, Shreveport, Louisiana, 1920–1960 (Louisiana State University Press, 2016). Over the years, Kingsley has also published on gender issues and architecture and has contributed essays to the Journal of Architectural Education and Journal of American History, among other publications. For ten years she wrote the architectural history column for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities magazine, Cultural Vistas, and contributed essays to its digital publication, 64 Parishes. Her current project is a book for LSU Press on the intersection of architecture and politics in mid-twentieth-century New Orleans.

Steven Nelson

Steven Nelson is the dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), responsible for its fellowships, meetings, research, and publications. Before assuming the role of dean in 2020, he was the Center’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor (2018–2020). He is also professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he served as director of the UCLA African Studies Center and advised the university on its diversity and inclusion strategic planning. Nelson has received numerous fellowships and has held visiting appointments at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Nelson’s writings on the arts, architecture, and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas and on queer studies have appeared in anthologies and exhibition catalogs as well as in African Arts, Architecture New York, Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, Journal of Homosexuality, Museums International, New Formations, and Politique Africaine. His 2007 book, From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa, has won multiple awards including an honorable mention for SAH’s 2009 Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award. While Andrew W. Mellon Professor at CASVA, Nelson completed manuscripts for two forthcoming books: “Structural Adjustment: Mapping, Geography, and the Visual Cultures of Blackness” and “On the Underground Railroad.” As part of CASVA’s initiative on African American art, he co-edited a scholarly volume titled The Black Modernisms Seminars, which will be published in 2021. Nelson has served as president of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, a member of the advisory board for CASVA (2013–2017), and reviews editor for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) and for Art Journal. Nelson earned a BA in studio art from Yale University and an AM and a PhD in art history from Harvard University.

Mabel O. Wilson

Mabel O. Wilson holds the Nancy and George Rupp Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and is also professor in the African American and African Diasporic Studies Department. She serves as the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-directs Global Africa Lab. She is the author of Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (University of California Press 2021/2012), which was the runner-up for the 2013 John Hope Franklin Prize in American Studies. She co-edited with Irene Cheng and Charles L. Davis II the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). Wilson  has received awards, fellowships, and residencies from the National Gallery of Art Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts (CASVA), Getty Research Institute, Architect’s Newspaper, MacDowell, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies In the Fine Arts, and New York State Council for the Arts. In 2011 she was honored as a United States Artists Ford Fellow in architecture and design. She received the prestigious Arts and Letters Award in 2019 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her work with Global Africa Lab. With her practice, Studio&, she is a principal collaborator in the architectural team that designed the award-winning Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers (2020) at the University of Virginia. Exhibitions of her work have been featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Art Institute of Chicago, Architekturmuseum der TU Mūnchen, Istanbul Design Biennale, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s Triennial, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and SF Cameraworks. For MoMA, she is co-curator of the forthcoming exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America. She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?)—an advocacy project to educate the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor. Wilson received her BS in architecture from University of Virginia, Masters of Architecture from Columbia GSAPP and a PhD in American studies from New York University.