This lecture by Mark Jarzombek (MIT) is the fifth in a year-long series of events titled Globalizing the Human. The series will invite colleagues from the humanities and social sciences (and cognate professional schools) to jointly explore questions that highlight the urgency of thinking globally about the humanities and humanistically about globalization.

Mark Jarzombek, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture, works on a wide range of historical topics from the 12th century to the modern era with a particular focus on nineteenth and twentieth century aesthetics, and the history and theory of architecture. He is one of the country’s leading advocates for global history and has published several books and articles on that topic, including the ground-breaking textbook entitled A Global History of Architecture (Wiley Press, 2006) with co-author Vikram Prakash and with the noted illustrator Francis D.K. Ching. He is the sole author of Architecture of First Societies: A Global Perspective (Wiley Press, 2013), which is a sensitive synthesis of first society architecture through time and includes custom-made drawings, maps and photographs. The book builds on the latest research in archeological and anthropological knowledge while at the same time challenging some of their received perspectives. His ground-breaking work on global architecture history is further highlighted by a million-dollar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that Jarzombek received to create a new scholarly entity called Global Architecture History Teaching Collaborative. Promoting the development and exchange of teaching materials for architectural history education across the globe, the collaborative provides awards to members and their teams to develop new lecture material from global perspectives. He is currently working on a book called Architecture Modernity Enlightenment that reassesses contemporary architecture from the perspective of Enlightenment philosophers. Jarzombek was a CASVA fellow (1985), Post-doctoral Resident Fellow at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Humanities and Art, Santa Monica, California (1986), a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (1993), at the Canadian Center for Architecture (2001) and at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (2005).

This event is also sponsored by the Global Studies Center and the Humanities Center. For more information, contact Michael Goodhart at goodhart@pitt.edu.