Sebastian Schmidt received his PhD in the History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT. His research fuses his background in cultural studies and critical theory with global and urban history, focusing on 20th-century urbanism in Germany, Japan, and the United States. He is currently completing his dissertation From Global War to Global Cities: Planning, Art, and Post-WWII Urban History in New York, Berlin, and Tokyo. Using global history methodology, this research examines the work of planners, architects, and artists to show the connection between the trauma of WWII and increasingly universal and abstract conceptions of the city on a global scale.

Schmidt holds a Master’s degree in Urban Cultural Studies from the University of Edinburgh, and his writing has been published in collections by Ashgate, Routledge, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. His most recent article, “The Archival Workspace: An Accidental Ethnography,” appeared in Thresholds 44 in 2016. His research has been supported under a Presidential Fellowship from MIT, research grants from the MISTI Japan Program, the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, the Dean’s office in MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, and the Center for International Studies at MIT.

For 2017-2018, Schmidt received a postdoctoral fellowship in Architecture and the Humanities at Rice University, where he will be affiliated with the School of Architecture and the Art History Department.