Jameson-Ellsmore

Ben Jameson-Ellsmore
Ben
Postdoctoral Fellow
mtz6fx@virginia.edu

I am an architectural and urban historian specializing in American and global cultural landscapes. At UVA, I teach accelerated general education courses called “Engagements” on the topics of redlining, the interstate era, and their legacies. I hope to help students in the Engagements to become informed and empathetic world citizens who are better equipped to tackle the pressing crises of our era. Before becoming a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer at UVA, I taught modern-contemporary art history and global architecture and urbanism courses at University of California, Santa Barbara, where I earned my Ph.D. My research is driven by a desire to understand complexity and inequity in the built environment. For my dissertation, I conducted ethnographic field research in Oakland, California and Detroit, Michigan, on the countercultural collectives called hackerspaces. My current book project, titled Hackerspaces: Visual Counterculture and Spatial Identity, examines the architecture and politics of access in US countercultural spaces. After earning my Ph.D., I worked for the Historic American Buildings Survey documenting the dwellings and landscapes of the unhoused in Oakland, California. I currently also work as the co-managing editor of the peer-reviewed journal react/review: a responsive journal for art and architecture.

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