Claire A. Zimmerman

Ph.D. Supervision  

Precandidates: 

  1. Cany Chen (with Erica Allen-Kim) 
  1. Ertug Erpek (with Theodora Vardouli, McGill University) 
  1. Yan Wu (with Assoc. Prof. Zach Blas) 

Candidates and PhDs: 

  1. Ai Liu (with Prof. Deborah Leslie, Geography and Planning), candidate 
  1. Sarah Wheat, History of Art, University of Michigan (2026). 
  1. Ciro Miguel, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich (2025): “Brasilia in 35mm: The New Capital through the Lens of Photojournalism, 1956-60” (co-supervisor with Prof. Dr. Philip Ursprung). 
  1. Jessica Puff, Architecture, UM (2025): “Affectations of Settler Colonialism and U.S. Historic Preservation Policy, Practice, & Professionalism within Indigenous Communities” 
  1. Emine Seda Kayim, Architecture, UM (2023): “The Stasi as an Architectural Producer: Surveillance versus Scientific Management in the East German Built Environment 1961 – 1989” 
  1. Vishal Khandelwal, History of Art, UM (2021): “Crafting Expertise: Art and Design Pedagogy and Professional Values, At the National Institute of Design in India, 1955-1985”—winner of The UC Berkeley South Asia Art & Architecture Dissertation Prize for 2022 
  1. Naomi Vaughan, German Studies, UM (2020): “Die Neue Reichskanzlei and Representation: The Construction, Demolition, and Disappearance of the National Socialist Architecture of Sovereignty in Berlin, 1938-2015” (co-advisor with Julia Hell) 
  1. Michael Abrahamson, Architecture, UM (2018): “Testing the Establishment: Authorial Signature and Professional Method in the Architecture of Gunnar Birkerts, 1958-1981”  
  1. Joss Kiely, Architecture, UM (2018): “Architecture and Itinerancy: Late Modernism and the Work of Minoru Yamasaki, 1951-1986” 
  1. Elizabeth Nijdam, German Studies, UM (2017): “Shadows Cast: German Comics after 1989 and the Legacy of East German Artistic Practice” (co-chair, with Kerstin Barndt) 
  1. Deirdre Hennebury, Architecture, UM (2012): “From Cathedral of Elite Art to Postmodern Post-Museum? An Investigation of the Urban, Architectural, and Exhibit Designs of the Tate Museum, Millbank and Liverpool” (co-chair with Robert Fishman) 

Committee Member:  

  1. Anna Renken, University of Toronto (candidate) 
  1. Katie Filek, University of Toronto (candidate) 
  1. Madeleine Aquilina, History of Art, University of Michigan (expected 2026) 
  1. Ultan Byrne, Columbia University GSAAP (2025): “State in Formation: The Architecture of the US Treasury and the Office of the Supervising Architect, 1852-1939 (external committee member). 
  1. Dicle Taskin, Architecture, UM (2025): “The Pan-American Highway Project: Imageries, Infrastructures, and Landscapes of Hemispheric Integration, 1923-1970” 
  1. James Denison, History of Art, UM (2023): “Stieglitz Groups: Race, Place, and the Essentializing Logics of American Modernism”  
  1. Irene Brisson, Architecture, UM (2020): “Speaking, Gesturing, Drawing, Building: Relational Techniques of a Kreyòl Architecture” 
  1. Chanon Praepipatmongkol, History of Art, UM (2020): “Fernando Zóbel, Chang Saetang, and the Mediation of Belief” 
  1. Ashley Dimmig, History of Art, UM (2019): “Ephemeral Edifices: Imperial Tents in the Late Ottoman Period” 
  1. Maren Koehler, University of Sydney (2019): “Architecture as a Mediating Technology: The Bank Lobby in Post-War North America” 
  1. Lori Smithey, Architecture, UM (2019): “Decadence and Camp: an Architectural Sensibility of Late Style” 
  1. Grant Mandarino, History of Art, UM (2018): “Seeing Class: Graphic Satire and the Cultivation of Radicalism in the Weimar Republic” 
  1. Alexandra Fraser, History of Art, UM (2018): “Fait Intérieur: The Material Realities of Intimate Interiors in fin-de-siècle France and Belgium” 
  1. Kristin Schroeder, History of Art, UM (2017): “Fashioning Materiality: the Realities of Clothing in Neue Sachlichkeit Portraits” 
  1. Nick Hartigan, History of Art, UM (2016): “The Purpose of Public Sculpture: Artistic, Institutional, and Cultural Motivations since 1965” 
  1. Myung Seok Hyun, Georgia Institute of Technology, Architecture: “Seeing Architectural Photographs: Space and Time in the Works of Julius Shulman and Ezra Stoller” (2016) 
  1. Elizabeth Keslacy, Architecture, UM (2016): “The Architecture of Design: The Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Museum of Design (1896-1976)” 
  1. Kush Patel, Architecture, UM (2016): “Practicing Lefebvre: How ideas of social space are actualized in the work of Bernard Tschumi and Lucien Kroll” 
  1. Talette Simonsen, University of Oslo, History of Art (2016): “Towards a ‘Photographic Synthesis’ of the Arts? A Study of Architectural Photography in Publications of Le Corbusier’s The Chapel of Ronchamp in the 1950s.” 
  1. Jose Bortoluci, Sociology: “Architectures of the People: Material and Cultural Politics of Housing in São Paulo, 1950-1995” (2015) 
  1. Antje Gamble, History of Art, UM (2015): “National and International Modernism in Italian Sculpture from 1939-1959” 
  1. Candace Hamelin, History of Art, UM (2015): “Behind Immaterial and Material Divides: East German Photography, 1949-1989” 
  1. Faiza Moatasim, Architecture, UM (2014): “Making Exceptions: Politics of Place in the Planned Modernist City of Islamabad” 
  1. Michael McCulloch, Architecture, UM (2014): “Building the Working City: Designs on Home and Life in Boomtown Detroit, 1910-1929” 
  1. Asynith Palmer, English: “Re-Constructing the Rust Belt: An Exploration of Industrial Ruin in Blogs, Fiction, and Poetry” (2014) 
  1. Matthew Heins, Architecture, UM (2013): “The Shipping Container and the Globalization of American Infrastructure” 
  1. Lauren Graeber, History of Art, UM (2012): “Gruppe SPUR: Art and Dissent in West Germany During the Cold War, 1957-1968” 
  1. La Dale Winling, Architecture, UM (2010): “Building the Ivory Tower: Campus Planning, University Development, and the Politics of Urban Space” 
  1. Didem Ekici, Architecture, UM (2008): “’The Laboratory of a New Humanity’: The Concept of Type, Life Reform, and Modern Architecture in Hellerau Garden City, 1900-1914”