Zeynep Çelik Alexander

Architectural History since 1800
PhD., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007

Zeynep Çelik Alexander’s work focuses on the history and theory of architecture since the Enlightenment. After being trained as an architect at Istanbul Technical University and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, she received her Ph.D. from the History, Theory, and Criticism Program at M.I.T. Çelik Alexander is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), the recipient of the 2019 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. The book is a history of an alternative mode of knowing—non-propositional, non-linguistic, and based on the movements of the body—that gained saliency in the nineteenth century and informed the epistemological logic of modernism in the German-speaking world. She co-edited, with John J. May (Harvard University), Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Daniel Abramson (Boston University) and Michael Osman (UCLA) for Aggregate, Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). She has also published in numerous venues, including Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, New German Critique, Harvard Design Magazine, Log, e-flux, Grey Room, Journal of Design History, and Centropa as well as several edited volumes. Çelik Alexander is a member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, an editor of the journal Grey Room, and a co-director of Columbia’s Center for Comparative Media. She is currently completing a book titled Imperial Data: An Architectural History, an account of storehouses of information in the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century.