Brittany Ellis is a doctoral candidate in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture. Her doctoral research explores how the nascent practices of photography and archaeology came together in the European exploration of the Middle East, investigating both the role of photography in the articulation of archaeology as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century and the subsequent position of archaeological photographs in institutional collections and ongoing disciplinary discourses.
Maggie Freeman is a doctoral candidate in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. Maggie researches nomad-state interactions through the lens of architecture, with a particular focus on the modern Middle East. Her dissertation “The Principle of Desert Control: Imperial Architecture and the Bedouin during the British Mandate (1920-1948)” examines how the built environment was mobilized and manipulated to control Bedouin nomadic pastoralists under the authority of the British Mandate in Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine, and how members of the Bedouin responded to and influenced building projects intended to control or surveil them.
Hampton Smith is a doctoral candidate in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their research examines the art, material culture, and architecture across the Atlantic World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Currently, they are writing their dissertation, “Making against Slavery: Artisanry, Capitalism, and the Material History of Abolition in the United States, 1791-1902.”
Joshua Tan is a doctoral student in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture at MIT, where he is currently an MIT Presidential Graduate Fellow and a Young National University of Singapore Fellow. He is co-editor of the peer-reviewed Thresholds 53: Idle (MIT Press, 2025). His recent interests are concerned with the role of industrial experts and architects in development, ranging from early carbon infrastructures of coal in East Asia to modern industrial planning in Southeast Asia.