HIAA PhD Candidate Tristan Whalen presented his research recently in DocTalks, an informal, peer-to-peer, weekly online forum by and for PhD students, postdocs and early career researchers in architectural history and theory. Organized by a team of researchers from ETH Zurich, The University of Manchester, IE University Madrid, The University of Hong Kong, McGill University, MIT, METU, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Wenzhou-Kean University, the forum welcomes a broad range of speakers from universities worldwide who are working in architectural history.
Tristan's paper titled “Prince Hall Freemasonry and the Construction of Black Counterpublic Space” argues that Prince Hall Freemasonry—the Black Masonic tradition established in late eighteenth-century Boston—offers a critical lens for examining how architecture has mediated race and human difference in American civic history. Working between two temporally disparate but thematically twinned case studies, he tracks the dialectical forces shaping the social and architectural production of Black counterpublic space. Congratulations, Tristan!