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 under contract with the University of Minnesota Press, and is titled ‘Collective Colonialism: Missionary Competition and Architectural Contestation in Ottoman Lebanon’. The book 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 in Architectural Theory Review (2021), ABE Journal: Architecture Beyond Europe (2021), and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2024).

My second book project, titled ‘Building “International Goodwill”: American Campuses in the “Near East,”’ expands on the above and delves deeper into the interplay between politics, developmentalism, 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 project 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. Research for this project has been supported by a Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Research and Development Grant (2023–25) and I will be developing the book manuscript during a Fellowship at the Kulturwissenschaftlisches Institut (KWI) in Essen in 2026–27.

Expanding on my work on the notion of 'informal imperialism', I have recently edited a double special issue (with Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi) on the theme of 'Architectures of Informal Empire' for Architectural Theory Review (28.3 and 29.2).

Together with colleagues from the Universities of Manchester and Liverpool, I am currently developing a new project that explores the imperial and industrial context within which the architecture schools at the universities of Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool were historically established and developed, through the support of a Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Collaborative Grant (2025–27).

PhD supervision areas:

• Imperial, colonial, postcolonial and decolonial architectural and urban histories (especially British, American and French imperialism in a transnational perspective)
• Environmental and material histories of empire, colonialism, and development
• Institutional histories (especially of medicine, religion, and education)
• Architecture and urbanism in the Middle East (19th to 21st century)
• Histories and theories of urban design (19th to 21st century)
• Urban conflict and post-conflict/post-war reconstruction
• Intersections of politics and architecture