May 2, 3-6pm
Campus Westend, Casino building, room 1.811
In this talk, Professor Anoma Pieris discusses the design, intellectual framing for and methodological approach to her most recent publication, The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War (Cambridge University Press 2022), co-authored with Japanese-American scholar Lynne Horiuchi. The book takes the arc of the Pacific Basin and incarceration environment heritage and memory as a framework for understanding how settler societies impacted by war negotiated changing attitudes to citizenship. Presenting the Pacific theatre of World War II as a site of imperial border conflict between Britain, its allies and Japan, the research covers memorial sites in North America, Asia and Australia.
Anoma Pieris is a Professor of Architecture at the Melbourne School of Design. She is an architectural historian and geographer interested in issues of postcolonial citizenship and sovereignty. Her most recent publications include the anthology Architecture on the Borderline: Boundary Politics and Built Space (2019). Anoma was guest curator of the 2022 MoMA exhibition, The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985 and is a member of the TraCe Scientific Advisory Board.
Download the poster here.
This talk is followed by the roundtable “Rethinking Cosmopolitan Memory in Postcolonial Contexts”.
Book Cover Image: Alex Selenitsch, Ideal City