Method Acts is an annual series open to SAH members showcasing innovative research methods used by graduate students and emerging scholars in architectural history and adjacent fields. Organized by the Society of Architectural Historians Graduate Student Advisory Committee (GSAC), it aims to create a space for sharing, discussing, and refining methodological approaches to interpreting built environment and material culture histories.
Research methods are political. The scope, subject, mode of address, the accessibility of evidence, and the researcher’s orientation all condition our encounters with archives and the objects we study. As architectural historians in the early phase of our careers, we have the opportunity to orient our research toward emerging and critical frameworks for engaging with historical evidence.
This series intends to address the following questions: How does one engage with inaccessible or non-existent archives? What are the challenges and potential limits in developing an inclusive global architectural historical narrative? As architectural history continues to realign with research methods that engage the populace, activism, and modes of decolonization, we seek opportunities that continue to shape inclusive disciplinary fields.
Through this series, we will discuss how to confront questions of methodology head-on and consider how our interpretive frameworks might expand architectural historiography and its disciplinary boundaries. By rethinking how we relate to our disciplinary frameworks and each other when discussing scholarship, we aim to provide a platform for emerging scholars to discuss alternative research methods. Thus, we encourage submissions from scholars implementing alternative and “nontraditional” methods in their work and methods that reconsider traditional disciplinary boundaries and narratives.
Method Acts is organized by members of the SAH Graduate Students Advisory Committee. 2024-2025 committee: Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra, Charlette Caldwell, Yannick Etoundi, Sylvia Faichney, and Priyanka Sen.
To register for the Methods Acts 2025 workshops you must be a SAH member. Please join SAH here -https://www.sah.org/membership.
Thursday, February 27, 2025
10AM PST/12 PM CST/1PM
EST
Register here
”Quasi-Object Architecture: Diasporic Cultural Architecture and its Materiality for Cultural Reparation"
Babita Joy, University of Washington
“Casual Causality: Walking as Methodology and Meaning-Making Process in Urban Environments”
Niloofar Amini, Institution of Creativity and Innovation Xiamen University (ICI)
“Creating the Forest: Aesthetic Contests in U.S. Imperial Forestry, 1862-1942”
Bert Geyer, University of Illinois Chicago
"Chasing Traces: brick and timber at Macquarie Harbour Penal Settlement"
Megan Sheard,
University of California Santa Barbara
Thursday, March 13, 2025
10AM PST/12 PM CST/1PM
EST
Register here
“Microhistory, Intimacies, and Globalization”
Romain David, Harvard University
“Builders, Brokers, and Women: Informal Works and Racialized Landscapes of Postcolonial Indonesia”
Rina Priyani, University of Virginia
“The Bengal Club: Colonial Leisure and Taste”
Nisha Shanghavi, University of California Santa Barbara
“Architectural History Research in the Age of International Isolationism”
Stéphane Gaessler, University of Toronto
Thursday, March 20, 2025
10AM PST/12 PM CST/1PM
EST
Register here
Invited Scholars:
February 27, 2024
"The Undecorated: Racecraft and the Pope’s Stronghold in Premodern Caprarola"
Dijana O. Apostolski, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
"Of Freedom and Discipline: Everyday Queer Spaces in Urban China under Postsocialism"
Nathan Shui, University of California, Berkeley
"Biographic Anthologies and Untold Histories of Architecture in Post-Safavid Iran"
Samira Fathi, Michigan State University
"Refusing Spatial Exclusion: Black Placemaking in the Margins of Brazil’s Capital City"
Luisa Helena Gonçalves de Melo, Tulane University
March 12, 2024
"Harem Mystique: Popular Architecture and the 'Orient' ca. 1900"
Sarah Wheat, University of Michigan
March 25, 2024
Invited Scholars:
Natchee Barnd, Oregon State University
