David Sadighian

David Bijan Sadighian researches and teaches the history of architecture, infrastructure, and material culture in the Atlantic World since the eighteenth century. His work situates the history of design at the nexus of empire, migration, capitalism, and political thought, bridging the disciplines of art and architectural history with global history, sociology, and related fields.

His current book project, “The World is a Composition: Beaux-Arts Design and Internationalism in the Age of Empire,” examines how methods of architectural composition contributed to the rise of international order during the height of European colonial expansion (c.1870-1930). The project follows the circulation of “universal” design principles codified at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts and investigates their role in imagining new institutions and structures of world governance – while also generating new local frictions and modes of resistance. With a geographic scope that spans Paris, Algiers, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, the Panama Canal Zone, the Hague, and beyond, the project draws from research conducted in over a dozen countries as well as participation in scholarly communities such as the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (DFK Paris) and Sven Beckert’s Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University.

David is also developing a second project on ephemeral architecture in Latin America. Selected as an Ahmanson-Getty Fellow for the 2022-2023 core program “The Forgotten Canopy” (PIs: Stella Nair, UCLA; Paul Niell, FSU) at the Clark Memorial Library/Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies, UCLA, David conducted research and fieldwork on informal building practices by fugitive slaves in pre-abolition Brazil and the legacy of insurgent architecture in present-day struggles for Black and Indigenous land sovereignty.

Beyond these projects, David has published on topics including the architecture of nineteenth-century international finance; theories of public space; the museum typology; racial capitalism in Belle Époque Brazil; and the currency of professional design expertise. Support for his research and studies has been provided by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC-IDRF), the Max Weber Foundation, the American Historical Association, the Krupp Foundation, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

David has an additional interest in curatorial work. He assisted in organizing retrospective exhibitions on Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Kevin Roche, and he served as a Curatorial Fellow for the Harvard Art Museums exhibition, “Inventur—Art in Germany, 1943-55.” Prior to his doctoral studies in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard, David was a Collection Specialist in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.