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. This includes my research on the political economy of post-war reconstruction in Beirut, the architectural history of informal imperialism in the Ottoman Middle East, and the geopolitics of American campus-building in the post-WWI Eastern Mediterranean.

I am currently at work on two projects. The first is a book project based on my dissertation, tentatively 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 as articles in Architectural Theory Review and ABE Journal: Architecture Beyond Europe.

My second project, tentatively titled ‘“Building Goodwill”: The Infrastructure of American Philanthropy in the Post-Ottoman Mediterranean’, 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.

More broadly I am interested in the below themes: 

• Colonial/Imperial Histories of Architecture and Urbanism
• Environmental and Material Histories of Architecture
• Post-Conflict Urbanism and Reconstruction
• Architecture of Educational Spaces
• Politics and Architecture