Medina Lasansky is an assistant professor of the history of architecture and urbanism at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the intersection of politics, popular culture, and the built environment in both Renaissance and 20th-century Italy. She received her Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture from Brown University in 1999. She is the author of The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (Penn State University Press, 2004) as well as co-editor of Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place (Berg, 2004). She has written essays essays on topics ranging from the pink plastic lawn flamingo to the Venetian in Las Vegas. She is particularly interested in the way in which popular conceptions of the Renaissance resonate with scholarly constructions of the period. She is currently working on a book length study on the intersection of art, architecture, landscape, and religious performance at the Italian sacri monti. She is the recipient of grants from the Fulbright foundation, Gladys Krieble Delmas foundation, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Architectural League of New York. She has held residency fellowships at the the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, and the Wolfsonian-FIU in Miami. She is also the recipient of the Martin Dominguez Distinguished Teaching Award , awarded by the College of Architecture, Art & Planning, at Cornell University.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Books:
The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy, (University Park: Penn State Press, December 2004)
Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance, and Place , co-edited with Brian McLaren, (Oxford: Berg Publishers, May 2004)
Essays:
"The Blurred Boundaries Between Tourism and History: The Case of Tuscany" in Architourism , edited by Joan Ockman, with essays by Lucy Lippard and Dean MacCannell et. al., (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2005)
"The Architecture of Redemption" in The Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg , Pennsylvania , edited by Lois Huffines (Lewisburg, PA: Union County Historical Society, 2005)
"Towers and Tourists: The Cinematic City of San Gimignano," Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the
Visual Culture of Fascist Italy , edited by Claudia Lazzaro and Roger Crum, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004),
pp. 113-131.
"Urban Editing, Historic Preservation, and Political Rhetoric: The Fascist Redesign of San Gimignano," Journal of the Society
of Architectural Historians , vol. 63, no. 3, September 2004, pp. 320-353.
"Tourist Geographies: Re-mapping Old Havana" in Architecture and Tourism , co-edited by D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren, (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004) pp. 165-186.
"Reshaping Attitudes Towards the Renaissance. The Fight Against <Modern Mania> in Florence at the Turn of the Century," in The Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century/Le 19e siècle renaissant, edited by Yannick Portebois and Nicholas Terpstra, (Toronto: The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2003) pp. 263-296.
"Tableau and Memory: the Fascist Revival of the Medieval/Renaissance Festival in Italy," The European Legacy, vol. 4:1, 1999, special issue entitled Post-Modern Fascism , guest editor Richard Bosworth, pp. 26-53.
"The Plastic Lawn Flamingo: Portrait of a Commodity," Thresholds. Critical Journal of the Department of Architecture at MIT , vol. 15, Fall 1997, special issue entitled On Creativity in Consumer Culture , pp. 60-63.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
History of Italian architecture and urbanism in the Renaissance and 20th century. The intersection between politics, popular culture and the built environment
RECENT COURSES
The Urban Landscape of Renaissance Rome
From the Utopia to the Ghetto: European Urban Form, 1350-1600
The Cinematic City
Bodies in Space: The Italian Renaissance Sacri Monti, Spring 2002
Architecture and Spectacle: Tourism and the Built Environment
Destination New Jerusalem: art/architecture/spectacle in Renaissance Italy
Reframing the Renaissance
Architectural Historiography
|
