Assistant Professor
Dr. Bryan E. Norwood is an architectural historian and assistant professor in the School of Architecture. His research focuses on architecture and building practices in the United States and Atlantic World in the long 19th century.
His first book, Professing Architecture: Morals, Markets, and Architects in the Early United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) tells the story of how a small group of architects built a profession amid the powerful forces of capitalism and religious faith in the antebellum United States. It recasts professionalization as a web of daily practices rife with incoherence: not a clear-cut institutional form but a potent mixture of ambitions, ambivalences, and complaints. Putting emotions and affects into conversation with the history of capitalism while considering the intersections of religion, race, and nationalism, Professing Architecture highlights the enduring contradictions between architecture’s lofty aspirations and its material realities.
His second book project, tentatively titled Extracting Nostalgia, is a study of architecture’s role in shaping the intersection of industrialization and historical consciousness in the American South between Reconstruction and the New Deal. His 2023 essay “The Southern Picturesque: Plantations, Modernity, and Architectural Visions of the New and Old South in the Lower Mississippi River Valley” published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians was awarded the Best Journal Article Publication Award by the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians. His 2021 essay “Museum, Refinery, Penitentiary” in Places Journal touches on some of the contemporary ramifications of this history.
From 2018-2021, Bryan was a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. Previously, he was the Charles E. Peterson Senior Fellow at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia in 2016-17 and guest-editor of issue 42 of the journal Log entitled “Disorienting Phenomenology” in 2018. Bryan received a BA in philosophy and a BArch from Mississippi State University, an MA in philosophy from Boston University, and an AM and Ph.D. in the history and theory of architecture from Harvard University. His writing has appeared in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architectural Theory Review, Places, Log, Perspecta, Buildings and Landscapes, The Journal of Architectural Education, Harvard Design Magazine, Avery Review, Culture Machine, and Philosophical Forum, as well as collected volumes.
EDUCATION
- Ph.D., Harvard University, 2018
- AM, Architecture, Harvard University, 2012
- MA, Philosophy, Boston University, 2011
- BArch, Architecture, Mississippi State University, 2009
- BA, Philosophy, Mississippi State University, 2009
PUBLICATIONS + PROJECTS
Norwood, Bryan E. Professing Architecture: Morals, Markets, and Architects in the Early United States, Columbia University Press, 2026.
Norwood, Bryan E. “Discounted Work: Selling Carpentry Labor in the Early American Republic.” Buildings and Landscapes 33:2 (Fall 2026): 32-54.
Norwood, Bryan E. “Grand Narratives in Black: The Architectural Histories of John Marrant, Robert Benjamin Lewis, and Martin Delany.” Rewriting American Architecture: Contesting the Myths of National Culture. Eds. Charles L. Davis II, Kathryn Holliday, and Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, 96-110. University of Texas Press, 2026.
Norwood, Bryan E. “Racial Capitalism, Cedric Robinson, and a Method for Architectural History.” Architectural Theory Review 28:2 (2024): 202-219.
Spencer, Chelsea; Norwood, Bryan E.; and Wickersham, Jay. “Contracts and the Evolution of Architectural Practice,” Harvard Design Magazine 52 (2024): 170-179.
Norwood, Bryan E. “The Southern Picturesque: Plantations, Modernity, and Architectural Visions of the New and Old South in the Lower Mississippi River Valley.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 82:1 (March 2023): 23-45.
Davis, John Dean and Norwood, Bryan E. “‘The Coastline opens Wide Tonight’: NORCO in the Greater Caribbean,” Avery Review (August 2023).
Norwood, Bryan E. “Whiteness.” In Lara, Fernando (editor), “Roundtable: What frameworks should we use to read the spatial history of the Americas?,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 81:2 (June 2022): 151-152.
Norwood, Bryan E. “Museum, Refinery, Penitentiary.” Places Journal (March 2021). 9,000 words.
Norwood, Bryan E. “Whiteness and the Architectural Profession in the United States.” Platform, September 21, 2020.
Norwood, Bryan E. “On Competition: The Problem of John Kutts’s Best.” The Journal of Architectural Education 73:2 (2019): 254-257.
Norwood, Bryan E. “Disorienting Phenomenology.” Introduction to a guest-edited issue, Log 42 (Winter/Spring 2018), “Disorienting Phenomenology”: 10-22.
