The Bartlett School of Architecture is delighted to announce that Edward Denison, Professor of Architecture and Global Modernities, has been awarded the prestigious Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust.
The Leverhulme Major Research Fellowships are awarded to established and distinguished researchers in the humanities and social sciences to complete a piece of original research over two to three years.
Prof Denison’s fellowship will commence in September 2025 for three years, during which he will complete a project titled ‘An Extractive History of Architecture for a Planetary Age’. The research aims to present a pioneering, timely and critical history of architecture that confronts the discipline’s Western foundations and their continued effects, arguing that architecture is a process that is intrinsically extractive, globally entangled and has planetary consequences. The research will be published in 2028.
This award is an immense honour and privilege. It allows me to complete research I have wanted to write for many years, and which is becoming increasingly urgent. The research will lead to a history of architecture that reckons with the discipline’s roots in Western dominator cultures and practices, and their part in heralding the Anthropocene. It aims to support the transformation of the architectural profession into a reparative and restorative practice attuned to redressing past inequities.
More information
- View Edward Denison’s profile
- Find out more about the Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowships
- Grappling with Chinese architectural modernity
Image: 1930s coal advertisement from Shanghai, China, in Architecture and the Landscape of Modernity in China Before 1949 (Routledge 2017)