Faculty Profile

Lasansky has lectured widely and published extensively on the relationship between politics, popular culture and the built environment. Her 2004 book The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy, (Penn State Press) won the Henry Paolucci/Walter Bagehot Book Award in 2005 and was the runner up for both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, given by the College Art Association for "an especially distinguished book in the history of art" and the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award. Her co-edited volume Architecture and Tourism. Perception, Performance, and Place (Berg, 2004) has just been translated into Spanish. Published Essays Include

• "Blurring the Boundaries Between Tourism and History: The Case of Tuscany" in Architourism: Authentic, Exotic, Escapist, Spectacular, edited by Joan Ockman and Salomon Frausto (Munich: Prestel, 2005).

• "The Architecture of Redemption" in The Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, edited by Lois Huffines (Lewisburg, PA: Union County Historical Society, 2005).

• "Towers and Tourists: The Cinematic City of San Gimignano," Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, edited by Claudia Lazzaro and Roger Crum, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

• The award winning "Urban Editing, Historic Preservation, and Political Rhetoric: The Fascist Redesign of San Gimignano," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 63, no. 3, September 2004.

• "Reshaping Attitudes Towards the Renaissance. The Fight Against <Modern Mania> in Florence at the Turn of the Century," in The Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century/Le 19e siécle renaissant, edited by Yannick Portebois and Nicholas Terpstra, (Toronto: The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2003).

• "The Plastic Lawn Flamingo: Portrait of a Commodity," Thresholds. Critical Journal of the Department of Architecture at MIT, vol. 15, Fall 1997, special issue entitled On Creativity in Consumer Culture, pp. 60-63.

Undergraduate Courses

• The Urban Landscape of Renaissance Rome
• From the Utopia to the Ghetto: European Urban Form, 1350-1600

• The Cinematic City

Graduate Seminars

• Designing Consumption Habits in 20th-Century Italy
• Sensational Space, Architecture and the 7 Senses
  
• Architecture and Tourism
• Bodies in Space: The Italian Renaissance Sacri Monti
• Reframing the Renaissance
• Architectural Historiography

Lasansky is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including those from the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Society for the Humanities, Cornell, the Wolfsonian-FIU, Miami, and the Fulbright foundation, and the Architectural League of New York. She is currently working on a study of the Italian sacri monti.

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