Ben Jameson-Ellsmore

I am an architectural and urban historian specializing in American and global cultural landscapes. At UVA, I teach accelerated general education courses called “Engagements” on the topics of redlining and domestic architecture. I hope to help students in the Engagements to become informed and empathetic world citizens who are better equipped to tackle the pressing crises of our era. Before becoming a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at UVA, I taught modern-contemporary art history and global architecture and urbanism courses at University of California, Santa Barbara, where I earned my Ph.D. 

 

My research is driven by a desire to understand precarity in the built environment. For my dissertation, I conducted ethnographic field research in Oakland and San Francisco, California and Flint and Detroit, Michigan, on the countercultural collectives called hackerspaces, which aim to help laborers reskill and meet the challenges of the contemporary economy. My current book project, titled Hackerspace Urbanism: Space and Access in US Technology Countercultures, examines the architecture and spatial politics of these open technology nonprofit organizations. After earning my Ph.D., I worked for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) documenting the dwellings and landscapes of the unhoused in Oakland, California. I also worked as the co-managing editor for Volumes 4 and 5 of the peer-reviewed online journal react/review: a responsive journal for art and architecture. Besides react/review and the Library of Congress HABS Collection, my work also appears in PLATFORM and Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.