Matthew Worsnick

Assistant Professor of History of Art
Ph.D., New York University
M. Arch., Columbia University

Trained as both architect and architectural historian, Matthew Worsnick’s research and teaching challenge presumptions of the canon by highlighting the collaborative processes of architecture and uncovering the many actors and agendas that create the built world. His scholarship examines the built environment in places of rupture and crisis, including contested borderlands in postimperial Europe, gentrification in New York City, and memorialization in post-genocide Bosnia. He is currently revising a manuscript, entitled Designs on Territory: Mental Maps and the Fabrication of a Contested Border, which examines how architecture, art, and engineering practices in contested borderlands impact and are impacted by the imagined and lived landscapes of local, regional, and global actors. His research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), the Wolfsonian-FIU Museum, and the Mellon Foundation.

Professor Worsnick teaches a broad range of courses on architecture history, design studies, curation, and urbanism, drawing upon his curatorial and professional architectural experience to teach architecture as simultaneously a field of humanistic inquiry and of technical-design practice. Since fall 2020, he has been working closely with a group of faculty at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities to develop interdisciplinary courses that use the built spaces of the university to think critically about architecture, preservation, and curation. You can read about some of these endeavors here.