About
Sarah Wheat is currently a Graduate Candidate in Art History at the University of Michigan where she is also pursuing a doctoral certificate in German Studies. For the 2023 - 2024 academic year she is a Doctoral Fellow participating in the Sturm Exchange cooperation between the University of Michigan and the Freie Universität Berlin.
Wheat’s research interests highlight cross-cultural and transnational aspects of architecture and design in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her dissertation, titled “Harem Mystique: Popular Architecture and the Orient ca. 1900,” explores the appropriation and commercialization of Islamic motifs in European and American popular architecture from approximately 1880-1933. She particularly examines how the spatial image of the Ottoman imperial harem was simultaneously commodified for profit and strategically used by some to challenge gendered conceptions of space.
In addition to topics related to orientalism, feminist, and spatial theory, Wheat is also interested in global modernisms, the diaspora of German speaking architects and designers before and during the Second World War, the interplay of scientific and spiritual understandings of European modernisms, architectural ethnography in the nineteenth century, histories of industrial architecture, and alternative methods for researching women’s interventions in the built environment before 1900.
She has worked at Kulturprojekte Berlin and the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago. Her research has been supported by the Freie Universität’s Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies Fellowship, the Max Kade Foundation Scholarship, among others.
Field(s) of Study
- 19th and 20th Century Architecture
