Hollyamber Kennedy (she/her) researches and teaches modern architectural and landscape history, with an emphasis on heritage politics and the material and environmental legacies of colonial building cultures and land practices. Focusing on transregional links between sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Eastern Europe, her work investigates the ways in which architecture and infrastructure facilitated imperial governance and reshaped agrarian modernities through rural modernization projects across the 19th and 20th centuries. Her current book project, Fallow Fields, is a study of remnant landscapes, residual architectures, and unearthed archives that together trace the making and unmaking of the built ecologies of imperial Germany’s settler frontier, both inland and overseas. Tracking patterns of imperial residue lodged in the ground, from the parched fields of West-Central Poland to the dried river courses of Central Namibia, this book draws critical attention to the delayed effects of Germany’s colonial building culture, in conversation with those living among its remaindered environments.  

Kennedy is co-editor of the forthcoming book Insurgent Domesticities (Columbia University Press, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City), and co-editor, with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, of the in-preparation book volume, Settlement. Her articles have appeared in Grey Room, The Journal of Architecture, Arch+, and The Avery Review. She is a contributor to numerous edited collections, including German Colonialism in Africa and Its Legacies: Architecture, Art, Urbanism & Visual Culture, ed. Itohan Osayimwese (Bloomsbury Press, 2023), Deutsch-Kolonial Baukulturen / German Colonial Building Cultures, a Global Architectural History (Dietmar Klinger Verlag, 2023), Unearthing Traces (EPFL Press, 2023), and Craft (Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2018), among others. Her research has been supported by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, the Mellon Foundation, the Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institute, the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at the ETH Zurich, the Getty Research Institute, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, for which she received the Carter Manny Dissertation Prize, and the Social Science Research Foundation, the Humboldt University in Berlin, the SAH, and the CAA, among others.

In addition to her single-authored work, Kennedy is engaged in numerous global collaborations. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, she is a member of the working group Shifting Shorelines, supported by the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, co-director, with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, of the international Settlement working group, which is currently preparing a forthcoming publication; she is a member of the global research collective Insurgent Domesticities, which has an edited collection of essays forthcoming, and she co-directs, with Rebecca Zorach, the Kaplan Research Workshop “Art, Community, and Environment” (2024-2027), which is supported by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University.

Program Area: Architecture and Urbanism, Africa, African American and African Diaspora, 18^th and 19^th Century, and Global Modern and Contemporary

Regional Specialization: Africa, African American and African Diaspora, and Europe

Selected Publications

Hollyamber Kennedy. “Wastelands of Empire and ‘Sites of Salvation’: Landscapes of ‘Reform’ in 19th Century Germany.” The Journal of Architecture, special issue “Territories of Incarceration” (forthcoming, Winter/Spring 2024).

Hollyamber Kennedy. “A Spatial Writing of the Earth: The Design of Colonial Territory in South-West Africa.” In German Colonialism in Africa and Its Legacies: Architecture, Art, Urbanism and Visual Culture, edited by Itohan I. Osayimwese, 89-121. London; New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2023.

Hollyamber Kennedy, “To Unearth and To Trace / To Bury and to Banish.” In Unearthing Traces: Dismantling the Imperialist Entanglement of Archives and the Built Environment, edited by Denise Bertschi, Julien Lafontaine Carboni, and Nitin Bathla, 109-123. Lausanne: EPFL Press and CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, 2023.

Hollyamber Kennedy, “Infrastructures of ‘Legitimate Violence’: The Prussian Settlement Commission, Internal Colonization, and the Migrant Remainder,” Grey Room 76 (2019): 58-97.

Hollyamber Kennedy, “Labor, in the Visible Recursive: Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki’s Eine Einstellung zur Arbeit,” Avery Review 8 (2015).