Dr Nina Vollenbroker

Associate Professor

The Bartlett School of Architecture

Faculty of the Built Environment

Joined UCL: 26th Sep 2005

Research summary

Underpinned by a firm aim to re-centrearchitectural narratives and foreground excluded voices, Nina Vollenbröker’sresearch highlights the marginalised authorship of women, people withdisabilities, migrants and people living in political instability. She isinvolved in a number of joint- as well as single-authored projects including Homeon the Range (an inquiry highlighting the spaces of the nineteenth-century USwestward migration), Oscillating Objects (an international,cross-disciplinary research project using architecture and material culture to strengthenthe identity of people living in environments shaped by physical destruction)and Deafening Modernism (research emphasising the work of entirely overlookeddeaf modernist architects).

Nina has experience with the interpretation of a wide range of historic sources. She has worked extensively with manuscript material at renowned archives such as GraphischeSammlung Albertina, Austria; The Henry E. Huntington Library, California; The Beinecke Library in New Haven, Connecticut, the Bancroft Library at The University of California at Berkeley, and The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Nina's monograph Home on the Range: Gender, Space and Belonging in the American West, will be published by Routledge later this year. She is furthermore contributing a chapter to Jenifer L. Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy (eds), Cripping the Archive (forthcoming, 2022). Nina has published essays in Borderlands in World History, 1700-1914, eds. Chad Bryant, Paul Readman (Palgrave, 2014) and Sacred Mobilities, ed. Tim Gale, Avril Maddrell, Alan Terry, (Ashgate, 2015). She has disseminated her research at academic conferences in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and the USA, through journals (Ground Up, 2012; Architectural Design, 2005) and other platforms (including London-based arts radio Resonance fm and The American Museum in Britain). Her photographic work has been exhibited internationally.

Teaching summary

Nina Vollenbröker is a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture. She is the programme coordinator of MPhil/PhD Architectural Design and the MPhil/Phd Architectural History and Theory. In addition, Nina coordinates the three undergraduate Architectural History and Theory programmes on the BSC and the MSci Architecture programmes.

Nina’s teaching at UCL is informed by her research and she focuses on a range of topics including spaces of identity, home as mobile practice, material culture and Deaf studies. She aims to introduce students to research methods and types of evidence which are less commonly used by architects, such as archival work and the interpretation of everyday domestic objects and personal texts.

Education

University College London: Other higher degree, Master of Architecture | 2005
University College London: Other Postgraduate qualification (including professional), Certificate | 2004
University College London: Other higher degree, Master of Science | 2002
University College London: Other Postgraduate qualification (including professional), Diploma | 2001
Oxford Brookes University: First Degree, Bachelor of Architecture | 1997

Biography

Nina Vollenbröker holds a Diploma in Architecture as well as anMSc and a PhD in Architectural History and Theory from the Bartlett School ofArchitecture, UCL. She is a registered architect in the UK and Germany (ARB / Architeketenkammer NRW) and has been a member of the Bartlett's History andTheory team since 2004. Nina is an editor for Architectural Research Quarterly and balances her academic responsibilities withindependent photographic practice. In 2021, Nina was principal investigator on a British Academy funded project OscillatingObjects. As of 2022, her project Deafening Modernism is being support by The Royal Institute of British Architects Research Fund.

Nina has received funding from The British Academy, from The Arts and Humanities Research Council and from The Royal Institute of Britisch Architects. She has presented her research internationally at institutions including Columbia University, Heidelberg University, The University of Notre Dame and Yale University. Nina's work has received recognition from diverse international organisations, ranging from her receipt of The Pioneer America Society’s Wilhelm Award for outstanding research in the field of material cultures studies to a recent invitation to contribute to a knowledge-exchange programme funded by The Council for British Research in the Levant.

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