Associate Professor Nancy Stieber
Office: McCormack 4-454
Telephone: 617-287-5733
E-mail: nancy.stieber@umb.edu

Nancy Stieber is an architectural historian whose interest lies primarily in the period around 1900 when the experience of modernity was being refracted through architecture and urbanism. She construes architectural history not as the study of great monuments and architects, but rather as a site of intellectual, social, and cultural negotiation through which a variety of participants – including the ordinary people who engage with the built environment - contest, explore, and invent the meaning of space. Her research on Amsterdam around 1900 investigates the relationships between the city as experienced and as shaped by the various constituencies that composed Amsterdam society. Her book Housing Design and Society: Reconfiguring Urban Order and Identity, 1900-1920 was co-winner of the 1999 Spiro Kostof Award for the “scholarship making the greatest contribution to our understanding of urbanism and its relationship to architecture.”

Her research has been supported by the Getty Center for the History of Art, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Delft Technical University, among other grants. She has lectured in the Netherlands, France, Turkey, and Canada, as well as in the United States. For the years 2003-06 she was editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the journal of record in its field.  Supported by an NEH Fellowship in 2006-07 and a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in 2008, Professor Stieber is currently writing two books.  One, with the title The Metaphorical City: Representations of Fin-de-Siècle Amsterdam is being published by the University of Chicago Press.  It investigates the ways that authenticity and verisimilitude were both thwarted and promoted by visions of the city and its history that tried to make sense of the labyrinthine changes brought about by modernity.  The second is the volume on the Netherlands in a series on modern architecture commissioned by Reaktion Books.  Professor Stieber is a member of the organizing committee of the European Architectural History Network and chairs its publishing committee.