About
Madeleine Aquilina is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Focusing on transnational modern architecture, she investigates histories of mass housing, the politics of land, and the dynamics of participatory practice. Her dissertation tracks how shifting architectural initiatives in Peru offered symbolic representations of Indigeneity as an alternative to land redistribution before and through the 1969 agrarian reform.
This research has been supported by grants from the University of Michigan's History of Art Department, Rackham Graduate School, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and International Institute, along with the United States Department of Education, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School for Social Research. She has presented her research at Ohio State University, the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, and the Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference. For the 2024- 2025 academic term, she was a visiting researcher at the Centro de Investigación de Arquitectura y la Ciudad at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Her work has been published in Visualizing the Carceral State: Art, Power, and Abolition, the Dallas Museum of Art’s Blog Uncrated, and is forthcoming on PLATFORM and e-flux architecture.
She is part of two longstanding public humanities projects: one that centers on Black Power murals made in Detroit after the '67 uprising, and another that probes the politics of art made within prisons, invested in abolitionist methods rather than reformist methods of interpreting this cultural production.
Interests:
- Latin American modernism
- Urban informality
- Land reform
- Modern architecture
- Social housing
- Marxism
- Social art history
- Art and the carceral state
- Abolition
