Ana María León

Ana María León is an architect and a historian of objects, buildings, and landscapes. Her research and teaching examines the modernity of the Americas and its transcontinental flows, with particular focus on how different publics relate to each other through spatial practices and discourses of power and resistance. She is an active member of several collaborations laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history including the Settler Colonial City Project (SCCP), the Decolonizing Pedagogies Workshop (DPW), Nuestro Norte es el Sur, and Detroit Resists. 

The focus of her research is the intersection of modernity, politics, architecture and art, with emphasis in hemispheric connections across the Americas, as well as transnational networks across the Atlantic. She is currently working on two book projects that tackle the transnational networks that converged in Latin America after World War II. Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet's Dreams for Buenos Aires examines the relationship between modern architecture housing projects, the populations they claim to serve, and the totalitarian states that seek to control them. Counter-institutions: Producing Pedagogies of Freedom turns to the potential of the museum, the prison, and the school, institutions traditionally associated with power, to produce counter-narratives to oppressive regimes. Additional work examines the intersection of public housing with public space as a site of dissensus, the spatial politics of resistance, and the complicities between capital, nationalism, and dispossession.

León’s courses examine transnational histories of art and architecture by discussing the intersection of political, economic, and cultural systems with the design and representation of buildings and landscapes. She encourages her students to think about how the ways in which we shape our environments both reveal and inform how we relate to one another.

León currently serves on the advisory boards of GAHTC, The Architecture Lobby, Thresholds, and Anales de Arquitectura. She is also editor-at-large at The Avery Review.

Affiliations

• Department of History of Art
• Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
• A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
• Institute for Research on Women and Gender
• Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies

Fields of Study

• Modern and Contemporary Architecture
• History and Historiography of Architecture and Urban Planning
• Participatory Practices, Politics, and Pedagogies