Sheila Crane

B.A., Art History and French Studies, Smith College;
M.A., Art History, Northwestern Univ.;
Ph.D. Art History, Northwestern Univ.

Assistant Professor

Sheila Crane joined the School of Architecture in Fall 2007 as an Assistant Professor of Architectural History. Professor Crane came to U.Va. from the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the architecture, urban histories, and visual cultures of modern Europe and the Mediterranean Basin, with a particular interest in France and North Africa. She is currently completing a book entitled "Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and the Remaking of Modern Architecture" that examines how architects and urban planners, photographers and theorists, archaeologists and preservationists mythologized their perceptions of Marseille and how their encounters with the city challenged existing representational tools and conceptual strategies.

Crane’s recent work has appeared in Future Anterior, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, as well as in collected volumes including Gender and Landscape (Routledge, 2005) and Cities: Space, Society, History (Princeton University Press, 2008). She has recently been a Visiting Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal where she began work on a second book project that analyzes movements of architects, transnational transfers of architectural ideas, and translations of built forms and meanings between Algiers and Marseille during the long process of decolonization from the 1930s through the 1980s.