Parity Talks IX Opening address
Author: Samia Henni
Tags: #Parity Talks IX
Blurb: Greetings by Philip Ursprung. Introduction by Els Silvrants-Barclay and Dominik Müller.
Samia Henni is a historian of the built, destroyed and imagined environments. She is the author of Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (2017/19 and 2022) and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (2024). She is the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (2022) and War Zones (2018). She is also the maker of exhibitions, such as Performing Colonial Toxicity (Amsterdam, Zurich, 2023/24), Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, 2017–22), Archives: Secret-Défense? (Berlin, 2021), and Housing Pharmacology (Marseille, 2020).
She received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture from ETH Zurich and has taught at Princeton university, ETH Zurich, Geneva University of Art and Design, and Cornell University. Samia was an invited tutor at the first-ever Biennale College Architettura 2023 at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, the inaugural Albert Hirschman Chair (2020–21) at the Institute of Advanced Study in Marseille, a Geddes Fellow (2021) at Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and a member (2020–23) of the Board of Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians. Currently, she is Visiting Professor at the gta, ETH Zurich and co-chair of the University Seminar “Beyond France” at Columbia University. In the summer of 2024, Samia will join the faculty of McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture in Montreal, where she was appointed Graduate Programs Director.