Trip to Isfahan 2013
  • Associate Professor, School Of Architecture
  • Assistant Professor, School Of Architecture
  • Nááts'íilid Initiative, Academic Liaison & Grant Writer, School Of Architecture
801-585-9968

Research Statement

I am a postcolonial scholar, specializing in sound studies in architecture. My work is tied together not by specialization in a historical period or geography, but by an interest in soundscapes. Focused on Britain, Utah, and South Asia respectively, each of my book-length historical inquiries is informed by studies of orality and literacy, sight and sound, plus empire and locality to explain how women, indigenous, subaltern, and state operatives contest each other’s power through architecture.

 

My first book Broadcasting Buildings: Architecture on the Wireless, 1927-1945 (Cambridge:  MIT Press, 2014) considered how radio and post typographic orality associated with it ushered Britain and its empire into the age of electronic modernity in which brick and mortar institutions of colonialism were replaced with institutions of aerial imperialism: all under the flag of democratization of culture. Architecture now produced effects not so much through material objects experienced by integrated bodies but by translating its locality, materiality, and experience into oral discourse dispersed over air under conditions in which audition was detached from the witnessing body.

SAH Archipedia: Utah (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016 & 2019) on the hundred most important sites in the state, looked at the interface of media and space from oral societies to digitally networked white settler colonial political order. I was the state coordinator and primary author for 80/101 of the peer reviewed write-ups; and the editor for the rest. The list covered everything from ancient Anasazi roads that were meant not for transportation but sacred rituals to the Central Pacific Railroad Grade Historic District that was a shrine to the age of efficient and opportune circulation. Readers can learn about the food technologies, tools and mnemonic devices found in 12,000-year-old Danger Cave in Wendover side by side with the rationalized food production and industrial tools and planning techniques shrouded in a quaint-looking 20th century dairy barn in Park City. The spatialization of the competition between church and state got an airing in the study of mobilization not of native landscape intelligence, but of Eurocentric revival styles by competing institutions.

This experiment in short-form scholarship has entered some of the classrooms at our school. It has also become a source of self-directed and guided tours (by school-teachers, my students and myself) in the state. The SAH Archipedia app makes it available to a broader architectural and general readership. It can be used more conveniently than the UVP book series Buildings of United States with which it is associated. In a state like Utah, dominated by the historical narratives of the victorious people who brazenly call their elders “pioneers,” digital humanities is our sharpest tool for pluralizing popular and disciplinary points of views. Digital humanities possess what Marshall McLuhan calls the “magazine effect;” namely they place disjunctive information side by side on an equal footing. In the case of Utah entries for Archipedia, this attribute necessarily elicits comparative readings of a kind in which past and present become analytical foils for one another. The result is robbing both modernity and tradition of their clichéd perspectives, compelling readers and visitors to these sites, to fill the void by indulging in interpretative labor.

Currently, I am completing a monograph on Resonant Tombs: A Feminist History of Sufi Shrines in Pakistan. This book recovers the geo-politics of speaking, singing, thinking, pilgriming and laboring women in the Sufi spaces. The history of Sufism has often been described as an intellectual history of great men. This book demonstrates that Sufism was neither the prerogative of men, nor simply an intellectual practice. It was also a spatial and sonic practice. Space and sound matter for writing women’s histories, invisible in the written archive. In this case, they help us recognize a feminist movement in the global south, one suppressed or maligned in historical record. Music, song, and chanting at Sufi shrines created an unspoken sisterhood between strangers. They forged a group identity and affective belonging among a socially subordinate class, including everyone from a queen to a spiritual guide, to a slave girl, who in patriarchal societies are meant to remain atomized in domestic space.

Research Keywords

  • Urban History
  • Sound Studies
  • Modern Islam
  • Media Studies in Art and Architecture
  • Imperialism
  • History of Globalization
  • History of Architecture
  • Colonialism

Research/Scholarship Projects

  • Resonant Tombs: A Feminist History of Sufi Shrines in Pakistan. PI: Shundana Yusaf. 07/01/2019 - present.
  • Global Architecture History Teaching Consortium. PI: Shundana Yusaf. Co-PI(s): Peter Christensen, Mrinalini Rajagopalan, Itohan Osayimwese. 04/01/2014 - present.
  • SAH Archipedia -- Utah. PI: Shundana Yusaf. 11/01/2013 - 12/31/2019.

Presentations

  • Saint John’s College, Oxford University Conference Theme: Stylistic Dead-Ends? Fresh Perspectives on British Architecture Between the World Wars Paper: “Overcome the Traps of Stylistic Analysis by Listening to Radio,” June 2013. Conference Paper, Refereed, Accepted, 03/2013.
  • 11th International Bauhaus-Colloquium Conference Theme: Henry van de Velde and the Total Work of Art Paper: “Figure of Speech: Reflections on the Idea of Gesamtkunstwerk,” April 2013. Conference Paper, Refereed, Accepted, 02/2013.
  • The 8th Savannah Symposium Conference Theme: Modernities Across Time and Space Paper: “Work of Art in the Culture of Mass Listening,” Feb. 2013. Conference Paper, Refereed, Presented, 02/2013.
  • Rocky Mountain European Scholars Consortium at the University of Utah Conference Theme: Europe in Sickness and in Health Paper: “Oral Travelogues and New Preservation,” Oct. 2012. Conference Paper, Refereed, Presented, 10/2012.

Languages

  • English, fluent.
  • Persian, functional.
  • Pushto, fluent.
  • Urdu, fluent.

Geographical Regions of Interest

  • Europe
    Nineteenth and twentieth century European architectural and urban history .
  • Southern Asia
    Nineteenth and twentieth century Islam with a special focus on South Asia, Iran, and North Africa.
  • United States of America
    Native American and Utah.

Publications

  • “Oral Travelogues and New Preservation: The Curious Case of Sir John Betjeman” in Connections, European Studies Annual Review, 2013. From printing press to smartphones, every media has influenced our traditional mode of making place, meaning, and identity in several ways. Radio broadcasting, for example, robbed architecture of its identity constituted in materiality, visuality, spatiality and locality. Second, the microphone translated space and distance into narrative, i.e., temporal events. Third, it destabilized sense-perception—our very path to reality—by transporting audition without the witnessing body. In addition, its simultaneity split the unity of “location” over sites of recording, reception, and transmission. Such radiophonic annihilation of place and body, it must be said, was accompanied by the manufacturing of collective identity afresh, the invention of new objects of desire, the updating of heritage, and the modernization of past. Drawing upon the oral travelogues broadcasted for the BBC in the 1930s and the 1940s by the architectural aficionado and poet laureate, John Betjeman, I propose to look at the conflicting relationship of the British preservationists with the promotional technology of radio. Betjeman’s travelogues aligned the notion of heritage to a public manufactured by mass media, popular finance, and welfare politics. His exploitation of the medium constructed a paradoxical view of the material residue of past, at once hopelessly romantic and radically pragmatic. His vicarious outings turned English towns and countryside into pleasurable “scenes,” to be consumed rather than contemplated. They taught listeners how to experience architectural surprises, recognize stimuli, and enjoy oddities. He offered a new olde England that fiddled with the architectural canon inherited from Edwardian antiquarians. It replaced works beholden to the scholarly gaze with works that pleased a casual glance. I will argue that Betjeman’s populist modification of the architectural canon was as much a critique of the scholastic order of things as it was a response to the uncertainty at the heart of the realm of radio. Accepted, 12/2013.
  • Harrison Bush and Shundana Yusaf, "Yet Another Treatise on Architectural Fictions," Dialectic II, Oct. 2013. Accepted, 10/2013.
  • “The English House in the Age of its Wireless Dispersal,” in Journal of Architecture, August 2011. From 1927-1939, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired hundreds of radio programs on domestic design, good housekeeping, and home maintenance. This essay examines the broadcast representation of the house. It considers how the composite image they created was influenced by the medium of radio and the politics of broadcasting. To tease out what changes, if any, occur when the same object of consideration moves from the normative space of reading to the novel space of wireless listening, I compare the broadcast word on the radio with the written word in the professional press. This reveals that the professional journal preserves the notion of house, even one that is mass-produced, as a monument, as an imperative of the individualizing and abstracting typographic culture. Radio, which Marshall McLuhan insightfully calls the reverberating “tribal drum,” inclusive, pluralistic and implosive, in contrast, made “house,” even one that is tailor made, synonymous with large scale production—mass-produced, mass-consumed, all-encompassing, everyday, and authorless commodity. But this definition of what constituted a work by the likes of Frank Pick, Anthony Bertram, Serge Chermayeff, John Gloag, and Amyas Connell was only the making of a middle-of-the-road, consumer-oriented-modernism that helped the constituent hierarchies of culture to operate in mass culture. Published, 08/2011.
  • Multimedia Review, “Design in the Street” and “Meaning and Purpose in Design,” in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, June 2010. Published, 06/2010.
  • “Monument without Qualities: Popular and Official Appropriations of Jinnah’s Mausoleum in Karachi,” in Architecture + Identity, Publication of Proceedings (Berlin: JOVIS Publishers, 2009). Pakistan, an Islamic Republic, was founded in 1947 on the political ideology of a homeland in which a people would be able to freely pursue their religious way of life. The irony of such nationalist principles is not lost onto those who define religion correctly but insufficiently as blind faith and lack of critical reflection. After all, from Pakistan to Israel, exclusionary religious nationalisms have been erected on liberal, even enlightened justifications. They derive their authority from rationalist paradigms of social organization to secure the freedom of religion. In 1948, the death of the grand narrator of Pakistan’s raison d’être, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, made the imagination of his mausoleum, as if, a natural site for debates over self and identity, past and future, state and Islam. From 1948 to 1968, hundreds of ordinary men, women and children mailed their visions for a befitting monument to his sister, Fatima Jinnah. Thirty-six of these letters survive in the National Archives in Islamabad. They are written in Urdu and English and come with drawings, models, and photographs. Their ephemeral monument when studied against the built structure provides a rare view. It reveals how official and popular imagination wove the yin and the yang: competing spatial configurations wrestling civic and religious ideals. This is the production of public space. It involves the most careful forging of architectural vocabulary with which to selectively define Islamic heritage within the bosom of participatory democracy. These negotiations are nothing but attempts to put modern governance and civic justice at the service of the preservation of some sort of “authenticity” and “tradition.” Need it be said that this desire (preservation) and its object (authenticity and tradition) are at once the product and the other of modernity. They go hand in hand with the uneven emergence of historical consciousness and the unjust playing field of global capitalism. The popular imagination of Jinnah’s mausoleum teaches us anything, it teaches us that religion as a cultural orientation is no less new, and no more fundamentalist than the liberations of modernist rationality. But this is by no means to say that we have arrived at the end of distinctions and differences and therefore history. Something still remains of the practice and concept of religious belief that cannot be reduced to faith in modernity. For one, they illuminate each other’s contours. “Spatial Inscriptions of Yin and Yang” will present some of the epistemological challenges encountered in the study of those religious identities in modern architecture whose experiences of modernity cannot be directly traced back to the intellectual shifts of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Building my argument on the archive at my disposal and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, I will suggest that a theory of religion, if it has to have epistemological currency, has to be sought in its cultural uses and practices, not logocentric labyrinths. Published, 01/2009.
  • “Tradition after Baudrillard: Speaking FORM on Early British Radio” in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Berkeley: IASTE, Winter 2008. Between 1927 and 1945, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired an average of two radio programs a month on architecture. This paper explores the effect of these simulated wireless sites on a traditional mode of knowledge like architecture. What happens when architecture, framed within the institutional vision of the BBC, encounters the specific mode of production, reproduction and diffusion of radio? I argue that early radio in Britain was not just another medium of representation but simulation that reinvented the social identity of architecture. This historical account of wireless sites gives us fresh insight into the perceptual and conceptual category we call “tradition.”. Published, 11/2008.
  • “Broadcast Culture: The Fate of Arts in the Space of British Radio (1927-1945)” in Thresholds, MIT: School of Architecture, Fall 2007. Over the years, the physical apparatus of radio has evolved from a heavy piece of living room furniture or a home made box with leaky batteries to a smaller, lighter and wireless transistor built into our walkmans and watches. In addition to this portability, Samuel Weber has pointed to radio’s power to transport audition where the rest of body cannot go, something that has challenged the classical notion of perception. More recently, Alan Weiss has explored the value of disembodiment of voice on radio and the liberation of sound from its source. Focusing on the history of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), I, in this paper, will examine the roles of these structurally specific movements produced by radio in another kind of portability that it introduced—the portability of culture to locations hitherto inaccessible to it. It is this aspect of movement that most ignited the imagination of the first generation of Continental cultural theorists who witnessed radio’s speedy incorporation in everyday life. Thinking of the performative and visual arts, Theodor Adorno speculated that the new “technology of distribution” would also change “that which is distributed.” Filippo T. Marinetti dreamed of an aerial art, liberated and uninhibited by the geographical and ideological constraints of existing genres. Frank Warschauer took stock of the disruptive effects of broadcast opera being “delivered to the residential dwellings like gas and water.” The foremost concern of these observers was the status of traditional forms of artistic expression at the threshold of electronic mass diffusion. More precisely, what was to be the fate of arts—traditionally encountered in the controlled settings of concert halls, salons and museums, and by limited, relatively informed audiences—when they were confronted for the first time with the option of being transported directly into differently mediated setting of the homes of a diverse and enlarged audience through the courtesy of radio? Published, 09/2007.
  • “Wireless Sites: British Architecture in the Space of Radio (1927-1945)” in IASTE Working Papers, (Berkeley: Berkeley University Press), 2006. Published, 06/2006.
  • Yusaf, Shundana (2011). The English house in the age of its wireless dispersion. Informa UK Limited. Vol. 16(4), 551-573. Published, 2011.
  • Yusaf, Shundana (2010). Frank Pick, Interviewed by John Gloag . "Design in the Street," part VIII of "Design in Modern Life," BBC radio broadcast, London, 6 June 1933, 20 min. Frank Pick, Lecture . "Meaning and Purpose in Design," part XI of "Design in Modern Life," BBC radio broadcast, London, 27 June 1933, 22 min. University of California Press. Vol. 69(2), 269-273. Published, 2010.