Fall 2025, Graduate Seminar, Department of Architecture, Florida International University

What are the tropics? How did foreigners come to view these regions of the world as sites of Edenic abundance and, conversely, founts of death and disease? And how have science, technology, and the design of the built environment historically sought to tame and exploit these “alien” regions of the world? This seminar will examine conceptions of the tropics from the late 18th century to the present, with particular emphasis on the "American Tropics." Investigating scientific, literary, and artistic representations, tropical consumer products, and tropical leisure-based developments, this course aims to establish the tropics as contested spaces that can only ever be understood in relation to their unmarked opposite: the temperate zones that hem them in. To help address these questions and many more, this course will introduce students to the basics of exhibition design and involve hands-on learning and visits to several local cultural institutions. Working in groups, students will ultimately propose an exhibition for one of several venues on FIU's campus! In addition to short lectures, weekly discussions, and video screenings, sessions will include conversations with invited scholars working on related topics and with museum professionals who craft exhibitions.  

Summer 2023, Winter 2022, Graduate Seminar, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto

This seminar examines the design of work and the work of design, from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, from The Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor 1911) to the streaming platform Twitch. The course aims to consider how technology and design have historically shaped our perception of people’s ability, need, and desire to do work. To do so the course examines a series of attributes, and their opposites—non/human, un/productive, non/white, dis/able, ab/normal, un/safe, in/accessible, in/attentive—that have been variously ascribed to peoples, objects, and spaces through weekly readings that combine recent scholarship from the fields of design history, labor history, disability studies, and the history of technology. The course begins with a discussion of the European and US empires' so-called civilizing missions that used Machines as the Measure of Men (1989) and concludes with a more speculative discussion of post-work and anti-work futures, including the question of How to Do Nothing (2019). Throughout, a variety of case studies, ranging from plantations to prosthetics and from slaughterhouses to smartphones, will situate our analysis of the design of work and the work of design, as they relate to questions of class, race, gender, and disability.

Spring 2025, Graduate Seminar, Department of Architecture, Florida International University

Winter 2023, Graduate Seminar, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto

How did we come to travel away from detrimental health conditions and toward places thought to provide climatic cures? And how do these regular migrations impact the environment and urban development on a global scale? This seminar examines the architecture, landscape, and visual culture of the global tourism industry and its intersections with capitalism and human-induced climate change, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. Relegating ongoing discussions over the possibilities of slow, sustainable, or eco-tourism to a concluding session, this course aims to understand the rise of leisure-based travel and development as integral to territorial and economic expansion and to consider their relation to shifting notions of human health and climate. Unlike the distance in space and time that some of these processes may evoke—that is, the sense that these things were happening “back then” or “out there”—tourism is an intimately familiar practice that offers a readymade foothold to ongoing discussions of urban and environmental crisis. The idea then is to use this familiarity to pose difficult questions about our shared future, filtering debates on the limits, possibilities, and contradictions of “green growth” through the lens of histories of the architecture of leisure.

Fall 2022, Undergraduate Lecture, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto

This course explores architecture and/as media through an expansive historical and theoretical investigation. The course unfolds as a series of episodes that examine architecture and/as media eight ways: and/as drawings, diagrams, images, exhibitions, materials, infrastructures, users, and/as platforms. These episodes are bookended by practical and theoretical introductory sessions, and a final discussion on the possibilities and limits of “medium design.” The contemporary use of the term media invokes screen-based interaction and the industries that design, support, and supply content to these screen-based devices, from electronics manufacturers and software developers to video game studios and news media outlets. In this course, we approach media from a broader perspective that understands media as tools and techniques. We aim to interrogate the ways media enable and constrain specific forms of knowledge production and specific ways of being—that is, the ways media loosely shape human thought and agency.