Zeynep Çelik Alexander
Zeynep Çelik Alexander is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her work focuses on the history and theory of architecture since the eighteenth century. She is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), the recipient of the 2019 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. The book is a history of an alternative mode of knowing—non-propositional, non-linguistic, and based on the movements of the body—that gained saliency in the nineteenth century and informed the epistemological logic of modernism in the German-speaking world.
She co-edited, with John May (Harvard University), Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Daniel Abramson (Boston University) and Michael Osman (UCLA) for Aggregate, Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). She has also published in numerous venues, including Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, New German Critique, Harvard Design Magazine, Log, e-flux, Grey Room, Journal of Design History, and Centropa as well as several edited volumes. She is currently completing a book titled Imperial Data: An Architectural History (University of Chicago, 2022), an account of nineteenth-century storehouses of information in the British Empire. The book visits several buildings constructed by the Office of Works in London at the height of the expansion of British bureaucracy in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Working Group: Extractive Media