Society of Architectural Historians Announces the 2022 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellows

2022 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellows: Adil Mansure and Anne Delano Steinert

The Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2022 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowships: architectural designer Adil Mansure and urban historian Anne Delano Steinert.

Mansure is currently a lecturer at Wenzhou-Kean University in Wenzhou, China, an independent designer, and a research associate at the Canadian Museum of Architecture in Toronto.

He received an M.Phil in architecture and urban studies from University of Cambridge in 2019, a post-professional M.Arch from Yale University in 2016, and a B.Arch from Mumbai University in 2011.

Mansure will undertake a 12-month circumpolar oral history project focused on Indigeneity and architectural sustainability. He plans to listen to the stories of elders and speak with the Haida, Gwich'in, Hän Hwëch'in and Inuit in the USA and Canada; the Sámi in Finland, Sweden and Norway; Tibetans in Tibet; the Buryad in Siberia; and the Ainu in Japan. Through his travels he hopes to learn how their place-making practices, which are inherently sustainable, emerge out of oral modes of information. He also hopes to apply such Indigenous methodologies to reimagine his future architectural practice.

Steinert is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati teaching in the Department of History and the School of Planning, and the founding director of Center for the City, an interdisciplinary, cross-college collaborative center for place-based inquiry, equity, and justice. 

She received a PhD in history with a focus on urban, public, and architectural history from the University of Cincinnati in 2020 and an M.S. in historic preservation from Columbia University in 1994.

Over the course of three months, Steinert will travel to key sites that she teaches about, with visits to Paris, Barcelona, Venice, Rome, Athens, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen. Comparing her work in historic preservation and public history in the US with similar work across Europe, she will explore questions such as: How is information about history and heritage communicated within urban environments? How are landmarks interpreted and what kinds of expertise are needed to make meaning of urban landmarks? And what strategies are used to tell the history of everyday buildings and people?

The two Brooks Fellows will begin their itineraries in spring 2022. They will document their travels through written narratives, photographs, video, drawings, and other media that will be published on the SAH Blog and in the SAH Newsletter.

Established in 2010 through a bequest from noted scholar and architectural historian H. Allen Brooks, the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship allows an emerging professional to study by travel and contemplation with the goals of experiencing the built environment firsthand, thinking about their profession deeply, and acquiring knowledge useful to their future work and contributions to their field and society.