SAHGB launches its inaugural Annual Conversation with a keynote by Prof. Suzanne Ewing, ‘Mind the gap(s)’, reflecting on the Voices of Experience project and feminist, intersectional approaches to architectural historiography. The event foregrounds conversation as method, exploring margins, archives, and new ecologies of knowledge.
Keynote Speaker:
Prof. Suzanne Ewing
Voices of Experience intergenerational conversations (2016-24) and exhibitions (2019, 2025) reveal a wide scope of what is defined as architectural work, how it takes place and how this knowledge enters professional records and culture. Over 10 years these have been informed by feminist approaches to women as subjects, an understanding of architectural work that includes social and immaterial dimensions, and a need for methodological creativity in building knowledge. This collaborative activity adds ‘documentary heft’ to specific records of architects and architectural practice.
The talk will reflect on Voices of Experience work and ways of minding gaps, contextualized in the wave of international research projects, publications and practice-research collectives from the last decade or so that share these concerns.
The keynote will be followed by a collaborative conversation amongst invited speakers and the wider audience. Conversation here is explored as a method by which the themes and provocations raised in the keynote are open to questions and discussions, thus disclosing and producing architectural knowledge that is communal, social and cultural before it is individual.
Panel Speakers:
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Suzanne Ewing is Professor of Architectural Criticism at the University of Edinburgh and was Head of the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA) from 2016 to 2018. Working at intersections of design and humanities, she is passionate about interdisciplinary knowledge generation and creative public advocacy of insightful architectural research. Alongside leading design-research studios anchored in European cities, questions of groundings and shifting notions of architectural projects, her publication projects include Architecture and Field/Work (2010, with Jérémie McGowan, Chris Speed and Victoria Bernie), Spaces of Tolerance (2019, with Igea Troiani), Visual Research Methods in Architecture (2021, with Igea Troiani), and Seeding Urban Transformation (2026, with Chris L Smith and Lily Chi). For 10 years Suzanne was co-editor of Architecture and Culture, the international Journal of the Architectural Humanities Research Association, which won CELJ award for best new Journal in 2014. Since 2015 Suzanne has worked to augment knowledge of women’s contribution to architecture and the built environment in Scotland, through the collaborative Voices of Experience project. Royal Society of Edinburgh funding in 2021 initiated an interdisciplinary research network, Women Make Cities, with an innovative researchers-in-residence programme.
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Luca Csepely-Knorr is Chair in Architecture at the Liverpool School of Architecture, where she leads the Landscape || Gender || Environment Research Collective. She is a chartered landscape architect (Chamber of Hungarian Architects) and art and architectural historian educated in Hungary (Corvinus University of Budapest and Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest) and in the UK (Manchester Metropolitan University). Her research focuses on the transnational histories of landscape and environmental history with a special focus on women’s contribution to shaping disciplinary agendas and the evolving social and ecological discourses of the 20th century. A former Lead in Education for the SAHGB, she is co-convener of the European Architectural History Network’s Women and Gender in Landscape, Architecture and Urban Design Interest Group with Professor Svava Riesto.
Between 2022 and 2024 Luca led the AHRC funded ‘Women of the Welfare Landscape’ project, that commemorated the network of women and their collaborators who have had a major impact on shaping the post-war designed landscapes of the British Welfare State, with a strong focus on public engagement through non-HEI partners. Her other recent AHRC Networking grant, IFLA 75: Uncovering Hidden Histories brought together academics and archivists from 10 European institutions to strengthen and expand international expertise in landscape architecture, landscape history and archival and museum studies.
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Laura Fernández-González, FRHisSoc, FSA, is Associate Professor at the University of Lincoln where she also currently serves as College Head of EDI (2023-26). Laura is an architectural, urban and art historian with expertise in the Iberian world, c. 1400-1950, and is currently a Trustee of SAHGB; and a Trustee of ARTES-UK. She has served as a panellist for the SAHGB Colvin Prize and SAH Chair for the Edilia and François-Auguste de Montêquin Fellowship. She is an invited member of the SAH Minority Scholars; Women; and Latin American Architectural Histories subcommittees
She is particularly interested in the architectural histories of the Global Majority and has undertaken extensive research in Peru, Cuba, Goa, as well as the USA and Europe, particularly Portugal, Spain, and Rome. She is currently at work on two projects, the first project explores ethnicity, environment and the social organisation of the building trades in four key port cities of the Iberian World, c. 1500-1800, namely, Lisbon, Goa, Havana and Seville. The second project explores the architecture and built environment of colonial Peru and pays attention to the role of Indigenous and African architects and builders who worked alongside their European counterparts. Laura's work has received generous funding from the Leverhulme Trust, Society of Antiquaries-London, British Academy, the Society of Architectural Historians (USA) among others. She has published extensively and her principal publications include: Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire (2021; Honourable Mention in the 2022 Eleanor Tufts Awards, SIGA); ‘Visual and Spatial Hybridity in the Iberian World’ Renaissance Studies (2020); Festival Culture in the World of the Spanish Habsburgs (2015; Paperback 2024). She has also recently edited a roundtable article entitled ‘Race and the Built Environment in the Iberian World, c. 1400-1800’ for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2024). Her most recent co-edited book is currently in production, entitled Public Rituals in the Portuguese Empire it will be published by Routledge in late 2026. With a former career in heritage and architectural conservation, Laura has worked at three UK universities in England and Scotland over the past 20 years (Newcastle, Edinburgh and Lincoln).
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Esther Draycott is a cultural historian interested in the connection between dress, architecture and everyday life, as well as critical and experimental forms of historiography. She is currently a Research Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Brighton, contributing to the AHRC project led by Dr Megha Rajguru and Prof Rupali Gupte ‘Designing Spaces, Making Sustainable Homes: The Design Industry, the Data Gap and Design Innovation’. This interdisciplinary project looks at how informal practices of housebuilding in the West of India and South East England could help the construction industry be more financially, socially and economically sustainable. In 2024, she completed a PhD at Glasgow School of Art entitled ‘Depth and Surface: Women’s style as memorial, resistance and reverie in late 1970s and early 1980s Glasgow’, a cultural history of women’s style in the city which treated the styled body as a fragmentary historical document. Her other published works include All Shadows are Alive (2023), a pamphlet on the history of public laundering in Glasgow and the outcome of her role as Researcher-in-Residence for the Women Make Cities research network, as well as several contributions to The Yellow Paper: Journal of Art Writing, and to Nothing Personal, the magazine on contemporary art and culture she founded and co-edited alongside Maria Howard, Calum Sutherland and Kiah Endelman Music.
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