I am a doctoral candidate at the Department of the History of Art & Architecture, and I hold a doctoral certificate in Collaborative Humanities from the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. My work engages with built environments and material cultures of the African continent and its diaspora, with a special emphasis on racial slavery, abolition, and French colonialism. Drawing on Black critique and postcolonial theory, my dissertation retraces an architectural history of enslaved and freed people in Martinique in the era of emancipation. My project aims to understand how the abolition of racial slavery impacted the built environment and, importantly, how freed people built their own sense of self and place in this new post-emancipation colonial landscape.
As a Graduate Fellow at the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice, I am a lead contributor to The Unfinished Conversations Series, a global digital archive composed of interviews and oral histories that foreground the contemporary legacies of racial slavery and colonialism. I have been involved in several of its adjacent projects, including exhibitions, documentaries, and a digital humanities website.
My writings have been featured in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, gta Verlag (in press), Architectural Theory Review (forthcoming), Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past (forthcoming), as well as exhibition catalogs for the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
My work has been generously supported by the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice (Brown University), the Cogut Institute for the Humanities (Brown University), the Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity in America (Brown University), the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Society of Architectural Historians, the New England Society of Architectural Historians, the French Colonial Historical Society, the Kermit Champa Memorial Fund and the Rebecca Molholt Vanel Memorial Fund. I am also an active member of the Society of Architectural Historians Graduate Student Advisory Committee (GSAC), Society of Architectural Historians Heritage Conservation Committee, and the Graduate Student Council (GSC) at Brown University.
Trained as an architect, I previously worked in architecture firms in Yukon, Canada, and Tokyo, Japan. I also collaborated on curatorial projects with the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Tezuka Architects at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
I hold a M.Arch and a B.Arch in Architecture from La Cambre-Horta - Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and a BSocSc in International Studies and Modern Languages from Université d’Ottawa, Canada.