Dr. Bryan E. Norwood is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on architecture and building practices in the United States and Atlantic World in the long 19th century.
I’m currently working on two projects. The first, Architectural Calling: Capitalism, Racecraft, and Historical Faith in the Formation of a US Profession, examines how the professionalization of architectural practice in the United States in the 1830s-1860s was intertwined with issues of theology, racecraft, class, and historical consciousness. Here’s a short piece I published in Platform on some of the themes in this book, and here is a recent lecture I gave at The Berlage on a portion of this project dealing with early nineteenth-century architectural contracts.
The second is a study of architecture’s role in shaping the intersection of industrialization and historical consciousness in the American South between Reconstruction and the New Deal. Here’s a recent piece I published in Places Journal as I’ve been doing some of the research for this book: “Museum, Refinery, Penitentiary.”
In 2018-2021, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. Previously, I was the Charles E. Peterson Senior Fellow at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia in 2016-17, and I guest-edited issue 42 of the journal Log entitled “Disorienting Phenomenology” in 2018. I received a BA in philosophy and a BArch from Mississippi State University, an MA in philosophy from Boston University, and an AM and PhD in the history and theory of architecture from Harvard University. My writing has appeared in Places, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Log, Perspecta, The Journal of Architectural Education, Harvard Design Magazine, Culture Machine, and Philosophical Forum, as well as collected volumes.
I’m currently the book review editor for Arris, the journal of the Southeastern Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.
Bryan E. Norwood 