Rebecca Yuste
Rebecca entered the PhD program at Columbia in 2019. Her dissertation “Building the Enlightenment: Architecture, Nature, and the Limits of Empire, Mexico City (1785-1813),” is advised by Prof. Barry Bergdoll. In it, she interrogates the relationship between Enlightenment thought and the physical realities of three imperial building projects: the drainage of the Valley of Mexico, the Botanical Garden of Mexico City, and the Seminary of Mines. Her work complicates conventional histories of ecological violence by centering the role that nature played as a site of resistance and colonial denial, ultimately arguing that the idea of failure is key to understanding Spanish American architecture in this period. In the 2025-2026 academic year, she will be a Junior Fellow in Garden and Landscape at Dumbarton Oaks.
Rebecca is also the co-founder of the Global Neoclassicism Project (globalneoclassicism.org, website under construction), a scholarly research collaboration which seeks to construct a global understanding of the movement outside of its traditionally understood geographies of Western Europe and the United States.
Rebecca has held curatorial positions at the Princeton University Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Jewish Museum. Her research has been generously supported by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), the Decorative Arts Trust, the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, and the Hispanic Society of America, where she was the 2022-2023 Rockefeller Brothers Curatorial Fellow. Her writing has been published by West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, and is forthcoming in Plants and Their Perceptions: Vegetal Agency in the Global Eighteenth Century, edited by Min Wild and Kathryn Gray, among other venues. Rebecca holds an MA and MPhil from Columbia University, and an AB with high honors in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University, where she won the Frederick Barnard White Award in Architecture.