The Journal Engaging the World: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Shape of Architectural History

We live in a historical moment that offers challenges to older disciplinary connections and the way architectural history has been traditionally conceived as a Euro-American practice. The current geo-political shift, accompanied by a digital revolution, places new demands on the discipline in terms of archive, readership, historicity, methodology, and knowledge-boundaries. If the future of architectural history rests on our ability to address these changes and forge new links with the wider world, what impact might it have on the shape of the discipline? In this panel I will share my insights as editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) and JSAH Online, and take up one strand of this problem to consider the manner in which scholarly engagement with digital media has changed the parameters of architectural history.  In particular, the presentation will focus on three issues: how digitization has complicated the architectural historian’s archive, how it has changed the way we connect with other disciplines and new audiences, and given our emphasis on visual-spatial material and analysis, how do we imagine a new kind of critical architectural history.