DocTalks 2025–26 Academic Year Program Begins on November 18.

DocTalks is an informal, peer-to-peer, weekly online forum by and for PhD students, postdocs, and early career researchers in architectural history and theory. Organized by an international team, the series provides a collegial space to share work-in-progress, exchange feedback, and discuss methods, writing, and historiography across diverse topics and periods.

The 2025–26 program will begin on November 18, 2025, and continue every other Tuesday until June 2, 2026. The full schedule will be available on our website: https://doctalks.net where you can also subscribe to receive announcements. For updates and highlights, follow us on social media.

Session 1 — November 18, 2025

1. Anxiety, Modernity, and Worldmaking: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Traveling Exhibitions of Brazilian Architecture
Presenter: Catarina Flaksman (Harvard University)

2. Ambition and Spectacle: The Architectural Patronage of Mehmed Ali Pasha of Egypt
Presenter: Ryan Mitchell (Temple University)

Session 2 — December 2, 2025

Porta-Kitchen: How Kitchens Travel Across Roads, Through Memories, and With Hands
Presenters: Anna Switaj & Feysa Poetry (The Bartlett, UCL)

Session 3 — December 16, 2025

1. The Architecture of the Making of the Author
Presenter: Sevgi Türkkan (İstanbul Technical University – İTÜ)

2. Houses that Grow Ibiza and the Anthropological Turn of the Avant-Garde
Presenter: Jolanda Devalle (EPFL)

Session 4 — January 13, 2026

1. Red Clocks and the Modern Metropolis: The Politics of Time in Red Vienna’s Municipal Housing Programme
Presenter: Jerome Becker (KU Leuven)

2. Claims from the Margins: Group Activism in Vienna’s Built Environment, 1870–1942
Presenter: Ulli Unterweger (University of Texas at Austin)

Session 5 — January 27, 2026

1. Constructing Freedom: Slavery, Religion, and Abolitionist Architecture in the Nineteenth-Century South
Presenter: Hampton Smith (MIT)

2. Prince Hall Freemasonry and the Spatial Production of Black Identity
Presenter: Tristan Whalen (Brown University)

Session 6 — February 10, 2026

1. “If One Knew Where to Look:” Encoding Plants into Data at the American Horticultural Society’s Plant Records Center
Presenter: Sonia Sobrino Ralston (Harvard University)

2. The Cemetery and the Digitalisation of Memory: Death, Collective Memory, and Virtual Space in the Contemporary City
Presenter: Stefania Rasile (ETH Zürich)

Session 7 — February 24, 2026

1. Cultural Imaginaries of Allergy and the Home in the Mid-20th-Century United States
Presenter: Erica Vinson (McGill University, School of Architecture)

2. Could Feminism Reside Here? Revisiting Domestic Space in Athens’ Polykatoikia
Presenter: Georgina Pantazopoulou (University of Antwerp)

Session 8 — March 10, 2026

1. Ashes to Ashes: Reading the Ruins of the Dutch Colonial Sugar Industry in Postcolonial Java
Presenter: Sandro Armanda (KU Leuven)

2. Global Ambitions, Planetary Forces: Drainage, Urban Planning, and the Making of Iskenderun, 1851
Presenter: Feyza Daloğlu (Middle East Technical University – METU)

Session 9 — March 24, 2026

1. Behind Closed Doors and Windows: Constructing the Domestic Interior in Greece, 1880–1920
Presenter: Thodoris Chalvatzoglou (National Technical University of Athens)

2. Small Spaces of Morocco: Rooftop Terraces, Women and the Colonial Gaze
Presenter: Zinab Himeur (National School of Architecture, Rabat)

Session 10 — April 7, 2026

1. Mediating Architecture: An Institutional Study of Knowledge Production and Dissemination at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1979–1999
Presenter: Natália Correia Brandão (Technical University of Munich)

2. “Worlding” on Display: The Chinese Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2006–2023)
Presenter: Yaran Zhang (University of Manchester)

Session 11 — April 21, 2026

1. Cultivating Urbanism
Presenter: Tithi Sanyal (University of Virginia)

2. Presence, Calibration and Failure: Spatial and Knowledge Strategies in the Co-Production of Drainage Infrastructures
Presenter: Alessio Mazzaro (Politecnico di Torino)

Session 12 — May 5, 2026

1. Unsettling the Typology: Mappila Muslim Women’s Reimaginings of Gendered Domestic Space (Kerala, India)
Presenter: Akma Nazar (University of Westminster)

2. Swiss Safe Space Imaginaries: Archetypes of Security, Stability and Abundance
Presenter: Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk (ETH Zürich)

Session 13 — May 19, 2026

1. Architectures of Anticipation: Illustrated with Three Acts from Wartime Turkey
Presenter: Elif Kaymaz (METU)

2. From Fences to Statutes: Privacy, Property, and Self-Governance in Post-Detonation Los Alamos, 1955–1965
Presenter: Lealla Solomon (Princeton University)

Session 14 — June 2, 2026

1. Architectures of Extraction: The Construction of Territory in Francoist Spain — Subjects, Technologies and Imaginaries
Presenter: Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo (Universidad de Alcalá)

2. Soviet Women Architects in the Early 20th Century
Presenter: Iouliia Tumdag (Middle East Technical University – METU)