Mary N. Woods will be coming to speak at the Modern Design History Seminar Wednesday, March 16, 2011, on “Eyes of the Flaneuse: Women Photographers and New York City, 1890s-1940s.”

Mary Woods is the Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural History at Cornell University. Both in her teaching and scholarship she has a particular interest in how film and photography shape and mediate our experience and understanding of space and the built environment as well as processes of the design and making of cities, landscapes, and buildings across historical periods and around the world.

Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Photographs of the American Built Environment (Penn Press, 2009) explores tradition and modernity in New York City, the American South, and Miami through art, documentary, and amateur photography as well as architectural photography. This book received subventions from the Graham Foundation, Andrew Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publications, and, at Cornell, the Clarence Stein Institute, Department of Architecture, and College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Professor Woods is also the author of From Craft to Profession: Architectural Practice in 19th-Century America (University of California Press, 1999).

Her next project is a book on women architects in Mumbai and Delhi. An article on Pravina Mehta, one of India’s first women architects, will appear in a collection on South Asian women and modern art and architecture to be edited by Professor D. Fairchild Ruggles. She will also collaborate with Vani Subramanian, New Delhi film maker, on a documentary about the fate of single screen cinemas in India. She has received fellowships for her work from the Fulbright Foundation, American Institute for Indian Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and Study Center. She has organized conferences, exhibitions, and film series at Cornell dealing with: violence and the cinematic city; Gordon Matta-Clark; and the cities of Los Angeles, Havana, and Miami.

Please RSVP above and join us in the Lecture Hall at 38 West 86th Street, between Columbus Ave and Central Park West, at 5:45pm for a reception before the talk.