Participants

Leandro Benmergui

Leandro Benmergui is an Assistant Professor of History and Director of Casa Purchase, An Outreach Center for Latin Americans Studies at Purchase College, SUNY. His work focuses on the social and cultural history of urban renewal and housing programs in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro during the Cold War.  His current manuscript is a transnational history of housing and poverty, framed within a multidisciplinary approach that includes social and cultural history, architecture, and urban planning. His publications include “The Alliance for Progress and Housing Policy in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires in the 1960s” (Urban History, 2009), “The Transnationalization of the ‘Housing Problem’: Social Sciences and Developmentalism in Postwar Argentina” in The Housing Question: Tensions, Continuities, and Contingencies in the Modern City, edited by Edward Murphy and Najib B. Hourani (Ashgate, 2013).

Geoff Burrows

Geoff Burrows holds a PhD in History from the CUNY Graduate Center.  A scholar of transnational United States, Latin American, and Caribbean history, with a focus on imperialism, immigration, and intellectual exchange, his dissertation was on the New Deal in Puerto Rico: Public Works, Public Health, and the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, 1935-1955.  He lives in New York City with his wife Vanessa and daughters Charlotte and Ysela.

Nicholas D’ Avella

Nicholas D’Avella is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at The Cooper Union.  He is an anthropologist and ethnographer of contemporary Argentina, with research interests in markets, expert knowledge, and urban life.  His current manuscript, Concrete Dreams:  Markets, Politics, and the Lives of Buildings in Post-Crisis Buenos Aires is an ethnographic study of a construction boom in the years following Argentina’s economic crisis of 2001.  Based on fieldwork with real estate investors and market analysts, architects, and neighborhood residents, the book describes how buildings were incorporated into emergent practices of economic investment, and how other forms of value were made to endure in the face of buildings’ increasingly central place in Argentine investment cultures.

Adrián Gorelik

Adrián Gorelik (Mercedes, Buenos Aires, 1957) received his undergraduate degree in architecture and his doctorate in history from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.
He is a Senior Researcher at CONICET and Full Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, where he directs the Centre of Intellectual History. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and the Simon Bolívar Chair at the University of Cambridge in 2011.
He is the author of La grilla y el parque. Espacio público y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1998); Miradas sobre Buenos Aires. Historia cultural y crítica urbana (Buenos Aires, 2004), Das vanguardas a Brasília. Cultura urbana e arquitetura na América Latina (Belo Horizonte, 2005), and Correspondencias. Arquitectura, ciudad, cultura (Buenos Aires, 2011), along with dozens of articles and essays.

Helen Gyger

Helen Gyger is currently a Part-time Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Previously, she has taught courses on architectural history and theory at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Yale School of Architecture, Parsons/The New School for Design, and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the architecture and built environments of Latin America in the modern period, and contemporary patterns of urban informality, considered as a global phenomenon.
She is the co-editor (with Patricio del Real) of Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories (Routledge, 2012), an anthology of previously unpublished essays by emerging scholars from Latin America, Europe, and the United States. She completed her PhD at Columbia University in 2013 with a dissertation titled The Informal as a Project: Self-Help Housing in Peru, 1954–1986.

Mark Healey

Mark Healey received his undergraduate degree in architecture and engineering from Princeton University, and his doctorate in Latin American History from Duke University. He has taught at NYU, the University of Mississippi, and the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut. The author of “The Ruins of the New Argentina” (Duke, 2011), he is currently working on a transnational history of housing expertise and social reform in the postwar Americas. He is co-coordinator of TAULA (taller urbano de las américas).

Jorge Francisco Liernur

Jorge Francisco Liernur received his undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Buenos Aires and graduate degrees in architectural history and criticism from the University Institute of Architecture Venice, where he studied with Manfredo Tafuri, and the University of Bonn.  He is the author of over a dozen books on Latin American architecture, urbanism, and history, as well as numerous articles and essays published in the leading journals of Latin America, Europe, and the United States. He has taught architectural history and theory at the University of Buenos Aires, the Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile, the Universidad de Navarra, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, among other institutions, and most recently was founding dean and professor at the architecture school of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, as well as a senior researcher with CONICET. He is a co-curator of “Latin America In Construction”, the current exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.

Ed Murphy

Edward Murphy is an associate professor in the Department of History and the Global Urban Studies Program at Michigan State University. He is the author of For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). He also served as the managing editor for the volumes Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011) and The Housing Question: Tensions, Continuities, and Contingencies in the Modern City (London: Ashgate, 2013).

Amy Offner

Amy C. Offner is assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently writing a book on postwar political economy in the US and Colombia, tentatively entitled Sorting Out the Mixed Economy.

Patricio del Real

Patricio del Real, PhD, works on the modern architecture of Latin America and its transnational connections with US cultural institutions. He has written on topics related to postwar politics and architecture, the historiography of modernism and the poetics of space. He is a Curatorial Assistant at MoMA’s Architecture and Design Department and worked on the recently opened exhibition Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980. Before coming to New York, he was the Director of the Clemson University Architecture Center in Barcelona, Spain. He holds a PhD in Architecture History and Theory from Columbia University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University. A committed teacher, he has taught seminars and design courses, as well as design-build architecture studios in the Southern United States, and participated in the construction of informal structures in Havana, Cuba, presenting his research on contemporary vernacular practices in Cuba at the International Biennial of Architecture in Havana. He has taught, lectured and given seminars throughout Latin America; co-edited the anthology, Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories (Routledge, 2012), and Taking Positions: architects write from Latin America, an anthology of original documents to be published in the Museum’s Documents series. He is at work on a book about MoMA’s mid-century architecture exhibitions on Latin America.

Marcio Siwi

Marcio Siwi is a Ph.D. candidate at New York University focusing on Latin American History and the history of the US in the world.  His dissertation explores the efforts to transform São Paulo into a modern and cultured city in the years following WWII through a transnational investigation of urbanism, architecture, and art.  He is particularly interested in the intersections between urban development, society, and culture.  Siwi’s most recent publication is “Rio’s Paradox of Plenty: Culture and Urban Reform in the Marvelous City” which appeared in the spring 2014 issue of ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America. He has also published in NACLA Report on the Americas and SAIS Review of International Affairs. In addition to a Social Science Research Council – International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF), Siwi’s research has won funding support from the Rockefeller Archive Center, New York University, The University of Texas at Austin, Tinker Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.  Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., he was the Program Manager of the Brazil Studies Program at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and a Research Associate at the Council on Foreign Relations.  Siwi holds a Bachelor’s degree from The Colorado College and a Master’s in Latin American Studies from The University of Texas at Austin.  He is a citizen of both Mexico and Brazil.