Zeynep Çelik Alexander
Lecturer, Mellon Post Doctoral Fellow
History and theory of modern architecture, history of modern aesthetics
Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007

Biography
Zeynep Çelik Alexander specializes in the history and theory of modern architecture since the Enlightenment with an emphasis on German modernism.  She was trained as an architect at Istanbul Technical University and at Harvard Graduate School of Design before receiving her doctorate in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT in 2007. She is currently preparing the manuscript of her first book, a history of the idea of bodily knowledge as it was elaborated in late-nineteenth-century Germany alongside modern conceptions of selfhood.  The book examines how this unorthodox form of knowledge was utilized by liberal reformers to develop what are today considered modernist practices in art history, art pedagogy, museum education, and architectural and urban design.  Alexander’s work on the history of modernism frequently intersects with the disciplines of intellectual history and the history of science and touches upon topics as diverse as the art historical slide lecture, early cinema, gestural expression, occultism, and the concept of the Baroque.

Contact Information
653C Schermerhorn
Telephone: (212) 854-1938
E-mail: zc2171@columbia.edu
Office Hours: Mondays, 12-2

Web Sites
Text to come.