S.E. Eisterer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, History and Theory of Architecture
Member of the Executive Committee, Media + Modernity
Co-Founder, Queer Space Working Group
Board Member, Insurgent Domesticities Group
Office: Architecture Building, S-110
E-mail: eisterer@princeton.edu
On leave, 2023-24
S.E. Eisterer is an Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the School of Architecture at Princeton University. In the year 2023-24 she is a Senior Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Munich Documentation Center (nsdoku). Before joining Princeton University, she was a faculty member at Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania, where she served as Executive Board member for the program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.
S.E.’s research focuses on spatial histories of dissidence, feminist, queer, and trans* theory in architecture, as well as the labor of social and ecological movements. Currently, she is working on two book projects: the interdisciplinary history and translation project Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Architecture of Collective Dissidence, 1918–1989 and the edited volume Living Room: Architecture, Gender, Theory, which illuminates methods and theories in writing about feminist and LGBTQIA+ spaces in architecture. S.E.’s writing has appeared in academic journals, books, and translations, among them Architectural Histories, Architecture Beyond Europe, Ediciones ARQ, Platform, and Log. With Erin Sassin, S.E. is the co-editor States of Emergency: Architecture, Urbanism, and the First World War (Leuven University Press/Cornell University Press, 2022). In 2020, she gave the Detlef Mertins Memorial Lecture on the History of Modernity at Columbia University, which honors promising research by an Assistant Professor.
Interdisciplinary collaborations in architecture and beyond are important to S.E.. Currently, she coordinates a Princeton Humanities Council Magic Grant dedicated to “Queer Spaces in the World, Concepts and Methods.” Prior to arriving at Princeton, S.E. co-organized the Provost-sponsored Excellence through Diversity lecture series from 2018-2021 with Maya Alam, David Hartt, and Akira Drake Rodriguez. With Torsten Lange, she co-founded the European Architectural History Network’s Architecture and Environment Group in 2017 and Queer Space Working Group in 2021. She is also a member of the Columbia based Insurgent Domesticities Group, founded by Anooradha Siddiqi.
Ph.D. students who work with S.E. are interested in interdisciplinary themes and conduct work in variety of fields, spanning gender and queer theory, environmentalism, the histories of housing and cooperative movements, architecture and literature, as well as histories of urban culture. She has previously coordinated undergraduate honors thesis in architecture at University of Pennsylvania, where she was awarded the Perkins Holmes Teaching Award, based on nominations by her undergraduate students in 2020. In the same year she also won the inaugural Lynda S. Hart Teaching Award for a faculty granted by the Alice Paul Center and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
S.E.’s scholarly work has been supported by the Botstiber Foundation for Austrian-American Studies, the Clarence Stein Fellowship for Landscape and Urban Studies, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Sachs Foundation for Arts Innovation, and the Viennese Mayor’s Office. She is the winner of the Carter Manny Award and the Bruno Zevi Award. S.E. was a Fellow at the Princeton-Mellon Initiative (2020-2021), the Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2017-2018) and the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum (2021-2022). She holds a Mag.Arch. from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University in History of Architecture and Urbanism.
Recent Publications
“Spatial Practices of Dissidence,” Aggregate, Special Issue on Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration by Rachel Lee and Anooradha Siddiqi, at http://we-aggregate.org/piece/spatial-practices-of-dissidence
“On Settler Huts and Core-Houses,” in Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Architecture. Gender. Politics https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783035627022-007/html
“One Day Walking into Freedom,” Log, Special Issue on Co-Authoring by Ann Lui and Ana Miljački
States of Emergency with Erin Sassin
Recent Interviews and Conversations:
99% Invisible, “The Frankfurt Kitchen,” by Katie Thornton with Roman Mars
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-frankfurt-kitchen/
Mocha Celis: Building Space for Trans* and non-Binary People
https://www.instagram.com/queerspaceworkinggroup/
Behind der Research, Princeton Alumni Weekly
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/behind-research-se-eisterer-explores-s...
