Lori Smithey, Ph.D. is an architectural historian, theorist, and design educator. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Michigan in 2019. Smithey’s research focuses on social and environmental challenges within the built environment through the lenses of disciplinary structures of power, identity narratives, and creative agency. Operating at the intersection of social history and design theory, she specializes in the history of modern architectural thought, from the Enlightenment to contemporary globalization, with additional expertise in nineteenth-century France and postmodern America. Her current project examines decadence as a barometer for a range of Western biases and their variability over time. This investigation into architecture’s interior modes of thought and production accounts for gaps between the field’s theoretically professed intentions and its materially based socio-spatial impact. Her recent work has been published in the Oxford Handbook of Decadence, Journal of Architectural Education, and TEXT: Journal of Writing and has been presented at SAH, ACSA, CAA and AHRA. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from The Cooper Union in New York and a Master of Science in architectural history and theory from the University of Washington, Seattle.
email: lori.smithey [at] gmail.com