Society of Architectural Historians Announces the 2024 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellows

Michele Tenzon and Stathis G. Yeros

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The Society of Architectural Historians has named Michele Tenzon and Stathis G. Yeros as recipients of the 2024 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowships. This unique fellowship provides the opportunity for an emerging scholar to study the built environment through travel and contemplation while observing, reading, writing, photographing, or sketching. The intent of the fellowship is to allow fellows to experience the built environment firsthand, think about their profession deeply, and acquire knowledge that they can contribute to their future work, their profession, and to society.

Architect and architectural historian Michele Tenzon is a lecturer at École d’Architecture de la Ville et des Territoires in Paris. His research focuses on the effects of agricultural development on the built environment in colonial and postcolonial contexts, and he is the co-author of Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. He holds a PhD from Université libre de Bruxelles and master’s degrees in architectural history and architecture from the University College of London and the University of Ferrara.

Tenzon will examine the development of palm oil and groundnuts as industrial crops in the 20^th century and the impact of that industry on the rural and urban landscape of colonial and post-colonial Africa. Over the course of three months, he plans to visit three different countries in West, Central and East Africa—DR Congo, Tanzania and Gambia—to explore cities and territories that were directly connected to the agri-businesses of these two crops.

Tenzon hopes to establish a dialogue between historical documents and the real-world use of artifacts, understand how operational landscapes are perceived, and how their memory reverberates in the process of their continuous construction and reconstruction.

“After this trip, I plan to use the materials I gathered, the knowledge I acquired, and the networks I established to design a collaborative research project that investigates the many ways in which we conceive of the opposition between the domestic and the wild, and how we (de)construct and inhabit the African rural landscape of the future,” said Tenzon. His travels will begin in April 2024.

Architectural historian and designer Stathis G. Yeros is assistant professor of architecture at the University of Florida. His research focuses on LGBTQ+ spaces, critical urbanism studies and spatial activism. He is the author of Queering Urbanism: Insurgent Spaces in the Fight for Justice, forthcoming from the University of California Press. He earned a PhD in architecture and a Master of Architecture from University of California, Berkeley.

For three months, Yeros will travel throughout the Deep South of the United States to collect evidence of queer and trans social life in the physical environment of a region where queer people’s rights have historically been repressed and are currently under attack. He plans to partner with LGBTQ+ nonprofits and university departments in the region to organize six workshops for local LGBTQ+ people to share their stories and views about what constitutes queer space.

“These stories will provide material about sites that I will then visit and thereby understand how LGBTQ+ networks occupy space,” said Yeros. “Hearing directly from queer and trans people who inhabit those spaces and following up on their stories aims to identify the characteristics of queer space at its intersection with race, religion and rurality.”

Yeros will organize workshops in Columbia, South Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Shreveport, Louisiana; Panama City, Florida; Mobile, Alabama; and New Orleans, Louisiana. His travels will start in March 2024.

Tenzon and Yeros will document their fellowship journeys through monthly reports on the SAH Blog that will include written narratives, photographs, video, drawings, and other media. For more information on the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship, visit sah.org/brooks.