Despina Stratigakos

Despina Stratigakos is a writer, historian, and professor. Her research explores how power and ideology function in architecture, whether in the creation of domestic spaces or world empires. She is the author of four books. Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (2020) examines how Nazi architects and planners envisioned and began to construct a model “Aryan” society in Norway during World War II. Where Are the Women Architects? (2016), confronts the challenges women face in the architectural profession. Hitler at Home (2015) investigates the architectural and ideological construction of the Führer’s domesticity. A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City (2008), which traces the history of a forgotten female metropolis, won the German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize and the Milka Bliznakov Prize.

Stratigakos has served as a Director of the Society of Architectural Historians, an Advisor of the International Archive of Women in Architecture at Virginia Tech, a Trustee of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, and Deputy Director of the Gender Institute at the University at Buffalo. She also participated on Buffalo’s municipal task force for Diversity in Architecture and was a founding member of the Architecture and Design Academy, an initiative of the Buffalo Public Schools to encourage design literacy and academic excellence. She received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College and taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo. During the 2016-17 academic year, she was in residence as a member of the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton. She currently serves at UB’s Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence.