Framing whiteness as a sensorial quality connate with ethical, aesthetic, epistemological, and ontological hierarchies, this edited volume will examine how the category of whiteness shaped architectural theories and practices across periods, peoples, and geographies. What was architecture’s role in race-making, constructions of whiteness, and processes of othering more generally? How was whiteness architecturally questioned, reinforced, conceptualized, practiced, and materialized? And how did whiteness intersect with categories such as class, nation, gender, beauty, hygiene, and health? In sixteenth-century Italy, for instance, architects theorized and practiced whiteness as analogous to fairness, purity, health, and morality. During Japan’s Edo Period, women’s powdered faces symbolized moral and aesthetic value. By invoking the white heron, the Himeji “White Heron” Castle (c.1617), also known as Hakuro-jō or Shirasagi-jō, architecturally emblematized grace and nobility.

We look forward to proposals that address architectural engagements with whiteness, concepts of race, and othering outside of Europe and European colonialisms, as well as examples from early modern Europe and the Atlantic world. Topics may include, but are not limited to, architectural treatises, drawings, maps, surveying reports, travel narratives, institutions, dwellings, building materials and techniques, demolition, interiors, historiography, periodization, and architectural controversies.

“Architecture and Whiteness in the Early Modern World” is considered for publication as part of the Routledge Series on Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities, edited by Nicholas R. Jones (Yale University) and Derrick Higginbotham (University of Hawaii at Manoa). Consult the series at: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Critical-Junctures-in-Global-Early-Modernities/book-series/RCJG.

Please submit a CV and abstract (300 words) to Dijana O. Apostolski (dijana.omeragikjapostolskimail.mcgill.ca) and Aaron White (awhitecaad.msstate.edu) by December 30, 2022. Completed chapters will be due on July 30, 2023.