Alexandra Quantrill

Alexandra Quantrill is a historian of architecture and the constructed environment. Her scholarship concerns intersections between technology, environment, aesthetics, political economy, and labor in the making of the built world. Her current project, Electric Women: The Techno-Feminist Modernism of the Electrical Association for Women, was awarded a 2022–2023 Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her book manuscript, Architecture of Enclosure: Environments of Labor and Global Capital, concerns technically constituted and managed environments in the architecture of bureaucracy, corporations, and finance. 

Quantrill has received funding for her research from sources including the Yale Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the Getty Library. She has published in Grey Room, Architectural Theory Review, and the Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians. She received a Ph.D. in Architecture History and Theory from Columbia University, an M.Arch. from Princeton University, and B.A. and B.Arch. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to Cornell, she has taught courses on the history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Parsons/The New School, and the University of Texas at Austin. Her professional background includes architectural practice in London and Barcelona, and curatorial projects at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.