Dr Yasmina El Chami

My work is at the intersection of Architectural and Urban History/Theory and Postcolonial Studies, and I am particularly interested in the socio-political and economic processes that undergird the conception and production of the built environment, especially in colonial/postcolonial settings.

I am currently at work on two book projects. The first is a book project based on my dissertation, titled ‘Collective Colonialism: Missionary Competition and the Project of the City in Ottoman Lebanon’. It examines the colonial nature and role of the two oldest and most important universities in Lebanon, the Syrian Protestant College (today, American University of Beirut) and the Université Saint-Joseph, as evidenced by their architectural and urban development. Contesting the view of missionaries as primarily religious, and therefore ambiguous, imperial actors, the project relies on archival research in over ten institutional and diplomatic archives in Lebanon, France, and the United States, as well as mapping and site analysis, to highlight the complex material, economic, and imperial networks underpinning the architecture and construction of their campuses. By demonstrating that architecture and political influence were mutually constitutive in this scenario, the book develops the innovative concept of ‘collective colonialism’ to describe the ways in which competition between marginal and ‘informal’ imperial actors embedded a divisive order in the modern foundations of the city. The project therefore reconsiders both the limits of architecture’s political agency and the nature of colonialism in Ottoman Lebanon. Parts of this project have been published or are forthcoming as articles in Architectural Theory Review, ABE Journal: Architecture Beyond Europe, and JSAH, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

My second project, titled 'Building “International Goodwill”: American Campuses in the “Near East,” 1919–1964', builds on the first project and delves deeper into the interplay between politics, education, and the racial-religious ideologies that underpinned American campus-building in post-WWI Lebanon, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Greece. Focusing on four American campuses built between 1919 and 1964, the research explores the role of architecture within America’s broader geopolitical ambitions for the ‘Near East’, and questions how these campuses were designed to shape a new spatial and regional political imaginary, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. I am currently developing this project through a Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Research and Development Grant (2023-24).

I am currently the special issue editor (with Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi) for issue 28:3 of Architectural Theory Review: Architectures of Informal Empire and I am a general editor for Architectural Histories, the EAHN's journal.