Prof. Dr. Sophie Hochhäusl

Sophie Hochhäusl is an Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and a member of the Executive Board for the program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. In the 2021-2022 academic year Sophie will also be the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Washington and Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow with the TU Darmstadt and the at the Munich Center for the Documentation of the History of National Socialism. Recently, she was a Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities at Princeton University and the Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

In her work, Sophie is interested in discourse on collectivity, difference, and dissent in architecture. Her scholarly work centers on modern architecture and urban culture with a focus on spatial histories of dissidence and resistance, intersectional feminism, queer theory, and gender studies, as well as environmental history and labor theory. Currently, she is working on two book projects: an interdisciplinary history and translation project titled Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Architecture of Collective Dissidence, 1918–1989 as well as the monograph, Housing Cooperative: Politics, Architecture, and Urban Imagination in Vienna, 1904–1934. Sophie has published articles and essays in academic journals including Architectural Histories, Architecture Beyond Europe, Ediciones ARQ, and Platform. Currently, she has forthcoming texts in Aggregate,Places, and The Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians. In 2020 she was chosen to deliver the Detlef Mertins Memorial Lecture on the History of Modernity at Columbia University, which honors promising research in architectural history. She is the recipient of a Carter Manny Award by the Graham Foundation (2015) and the Bruno Zevi Award (2017) for the best historical-critical essay by an emerging scholar.

Sophie’s research has been supported by the Botstiber Foundation for Austrian-American Studies, the Clarence Stein Fellowship for Landscape and Urban Studies, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, and the Viennese Mayor’s Office. In 2020 she was awarded the Perkins Holmes Undergraduate Teaching Award, based on nominations by her undergraduate students. In the same year she also won the inaugural Lynda S. Hart Teaching Award for a faculty granted by the Alice Paul Center and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. At the University of Pennsylvania, Sophie coordinates the undergraduate honors thesis in architecture in the College of Arts and Sciences and she is a member of the Graduate Group in Design. She co-organizes a Provost-sponsored Excellence through Diversity lecture series.