Tanya Southcott

I studied architecture at the University of Waterloo (BES, MArch) and McGill University (MArch, PhD) in Canada where I also completed a Certificate of Heritage Conservation Planning from the University of Victoria. I worked for several years as a registered architect in Canada before returning to university to complete my PhD. My award-winning doctoral research was supervised by Annmarie Adams with committee members David Theodore and Cynthia Hammond and funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Québec Fonds de Recherche, Société et Culture (FRSQ)

My research centres feminist approaches to architectural history writing, focusing on the recovery of women’s contributions to architectural culture. In my PhD, I focused on the work of women photographers, arguing for a subtractive approach to architectural history by looking to sites of destruction (rather than construction) as opportunities to engage a gendered city. My most recent work, ‘Reconstructing the Sainte Famille Women’s Centre,’ aims to explore feminist heritages of architecture through oral histories and ephemera related to the building’s inhabitation.

I am also interested in pedagogies of architecture and the role of the humanities in architectural education. As part of my Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, I studied the undergraduate dissertation as a form of authentic assessment. My research describes the transformative potential of the dissertation for architectural students and its capacity for subversion within increasingly standardised and professionalised approaches to learning.

I currently sit on the Steering Committee for the Architectural Humanities Research Association where I am also a member of the Lobbying Working Group. I co-lead the Architectural and Spatial Histories Strand of the Centre for Design History and am a member of the Architecture Industry Advisory Board both at the University of Brighton. Through these initiatives, I use my research, advocacy and teaching experience to promote the importance of humanities in architectural education and in the wider profession.