Society of Architectural Historians Announces 2025 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellows

Over the course of six months in 2025, Amalie plans to travel along the eastern coast of the United States before departing for Italy, China, Albania, Libya, and the Dodecanese Islands in Greece. Her itinerary focuses on tracing the built environment—buildings, monuments, public spaces, and street names—linked to a selection of Italy’s former colonies, protectorates, and concessions. By asking questions through multiple lenses — including architectural history, preservation, urban planning, and alternative practices such as the arts and community-based discourses — she seeks to uncover the elusive connections between Italy’s recent imperial past from the early twentieth-century.

“Beyond being a tourist and guest, I am deeply humbled by the rare opportunity to travel to both unfamiliar and previously visited sites as a H. Allen Brooks Fellow for the Society of Architectural Historians,” said Elfallah, who has been invited to speak at and attend the SAH Annual Conference in Atlanta this year. As a panelist for the session “Literature and Contested Architectural Heritage,” she will explore the intersection of fiction and history by engaging with the writings of Alessandro Spina—a nom de plume of Basili Shafik Khouzam (Benghazi, 1927–Rovato, 2013)—to build a discourse around the architecture constructed during Fascist Italy’s occupation of Cyrenaica, Libya, in the 1930s. “Speaking at my first SAH conference and receiving the fellowship to support my travel is a profound privilege,” she added. “I sincerely value the opportunity to document my encounters with scattered remnants of Italy’s colonial past, particularly at a time of growing reflection on modern colonial histories.”

Francesca Sisci is an architect and adjunct professor at Polytechnic of  Bari. She has a PhD in Architectural Representation and her approach of research is distinctive in its integration of multiple disciplines, including art history, architectural theory, and photography. She focuses on exploring aspects of visual perception and how these can be translated into images.

Her main research project revolves around the theoretical work of Robert Venturi. Under the supervision of Prof. David Brownlee at the University of Pennsylvania she conducted a groundbreaking study, uncovering a substantial amount of previously unpublished graphic material created by Venturi for his influential book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). The findings of her research have been presented in both national and international journals and symposia.

Her Brooks-funded travel itinerary is based on a desire to explore the feminine imaginary as it applies to architecture from ancient to contemporary structures.  She will explore this important question by trying to identify the types of architectural spaces that in different ways are connected with the female gender. In the course of a 6-month itinerary she will visit sites in Sardinia, Malta and Gozo, Türkiye, Crete, UK and Ireland, Norway, Greenland, the northeastern United States, and Mexico. 

"I have outlined a comprehensive itinerary that begins with the architecture of Neolithic civilizations and then leaps to contemporary structures," she said. "I chose to travel to places so ancient and remote in time to try to understand what the word architecture might have meant to these forgotten cultures. How was social and religious organization represented in architectural space? And how did it designate and accommodate different gender identities (male and female)?"

Sisci will begin her travel in March 2025.