About
Dr. Demetra Vogiatzaki (she/her) is a licensed architect-engineer and a historian of 18th-century architecture, holding a Ph.D. in History of Architecture from Harvard University. Her work is focused on the politics of architectural imagination in the Enlightenment, the critical infrastructure of the French colonial state and the historiographical treatment of labor, uprisings, and overlooked subjects.
She is particularly invested in questions of collectivity and collaboration, researching the theorization of these idea(l)s in the context of the French Enlightenment and beyond. As a trained designer, she cares deeply about architectural form, and her pedagogy revolves around the history and theory of architecture in its ecological, gendered, and colonial dimensions.
Dr. Vogiatzaki’s interest in diversifying, decolonizing, and collectivizing historical narratives is by no means limited to her research and courses. In 2023 she was elected Emerging Scholar Board Member-at-large at HECAA (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture) following a three-year volunteering tenure at the HECAA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee.
She is a proud organizer of DocTalks (www.doctalks.net) spearheading the “DocTalks x MoMA” collaboration, which is currently running its third year, as well as the “DocTalks x CCA” series, amplifying the voices of early career researchers. To this day, more than 150 institutions worldwide have been represented in the platform, fostering community beyond departmental walls.
Dr. Vogiatzaki cares deeply about labor equity, and student mental health, partaking in academic workers unions, and actively advocating for students' needs. In the past, she represented the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the Harvard-wide Mental Health Task Force, putting forward and authoring concrete proposals on the enhancement of advising structures at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
During the pandemic, she joined forces with colleagues from various institutions on discussions and events foregrounding queer perspectives in design, and the importance of labor and social justice movements as part of the Princeton-led Queer Space Working Group initiative. In December the group will hold its second annual meeting in Zurich with part of the programming taking place at ETH.
Feel free to reach out should you have questions or interest in participating in any of these initiatives.
You can download Dr. Vogiatzaki’s CV external page here.