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Home > Faculty, Students
& Staff : W. John Archer
W. John Archer
Professor
Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, Chair
Office: 235 Nicholson Hall
Appointments welcome at all times
Phone: (612) 624-3830, (612) 624-8099
Fax: (612) 626-0228
E-mail: archer@umn.edu
John Archer received his PhD and MA degrees from Harvard University
in 1969 and 1977 and his BA from Yale University in 1968. At the
University of Minnesota
he has been professor in Art History, American Studies, and Cultural Studies
and Comparative Literature, where he has taught courses such as “Landscape, Nature, and
Society,” “Theoretical Constructions of Space,”“Suburbia” and "Dwelling." He
has been awarded with the Arthur "Red" Motley Exemplary Teaching
Award, 1998-99, and the First Annual Award for Excellence in the Teaching of
Writing in 1998.
Anchored in architectural history and theory, his interests range from the
critique of present-day suburbia to the analysis of historical practices in
colonial cities of South Asia. His primary research has focused on
eighteenth-century English architecture, landscape, and urbanism, colonial
cities in India and Indonesia, nineteenth- and twentieth- century American
architecture, landscape, and urbanism, and especially nineteenth- and
twentieth- century English and American suburbs. Among the critical issues
on which his teaching and writing have focused are the role of built space
in the production of identity, the complex and various functions of
dwellings in human cultures, and the role of media, marketing, and
government interests in the genesis of present-day paradigms of suburbia.
Some of his publications include: The Literature
of British Domestic Architecture, 1715-1842. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985); “Paras,
Palaces, Pathogens: Frameworks for the Growth of Calcutta, 1800-1850,” City & Society 12:2 (2000):19-54; “Colonial Suburbs in South Asia, 1700-1850,
and the Spaces of Modernity,” in Visions
of Suburbia, Roger Silverstone,
ed. (London: Routledge, 1997), 26-54; “Ideology and Aspiration:
Individualism, the Middle Class, and the Genesis of the Anglo-American
Suburb,” Journal of Urban History 14:2, February 1988, 214-253; “Country
and City in the American Romantic Suburb,” Journal
of the Society of Architectural Historians 42:2 (May 1983):
139-156. His next book is titled "Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to
American Dream House, 1690-2000" (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2005).
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August 28, 2008
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