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, (Un)settling Territory, which emerges out of her doctoral research, examines the visual and technical building cultures of two ministry-supported ‘settler-state’ projects in the non-aligned jurisdictions of German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia, and the German states of Posen and West Prussia, in present-day Poland.

Kennedy is co-editor (with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi) of the forthcoming volume Settlement (gta Verlag, 2025) and the forthcoming volume Insurgent Domesticities. Her articles have appeared in Grey Room, The Journal of Architecture, Arch+, and The Avery Review. She is a contributor to the volumes German Colonialism in Africa and Its Legacies: Architecture, Art, Urbanism & Visual Culture (Bloomsbury, 2023), German Colonial Building Cultures, a Global Architectural History in 100 Visual Primary Sources (Dietmar Klinger Verlag, 2023), Unearthing Traces: Dismantling the Imperialist Entanglement of Archives and the Built Environment (EPFL Press and CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, 2023), Documents of Contemporary Art: Craft (Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2018), and Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! A Paul Scheerbart Reader (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Kennedy has received grants and fellowships from the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, Humboldt University, the DAAD, the Max Planck-Kunsthistorisches Institute, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, which awarded her the Carter Manny Dissertation Prize in 2018.

Kennedy serves on the Board of Directors of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative; she is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Research and Mediation Project “A Future for Whose Past? The Heritage of Minorities, Fringe Groups and People Without a Lobby,” for the Architectural Heritage Year 2025 / ICOMOS Suisse. Kennedy co-directs the Settlement project, and she is a member of the international research collective Insurgent Domesticities.

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).