Date:
Location:
Breaking the Bronze Ceiling uncovers a glaring omission in our global memorial landscape—the conspicuous absence of women. Exploring this neglected narrative, the book emerges as the foremost guide to women's memorialization across diverse cultures and ages. As global memorials come under intense examination, with metropolises vying for a more inclusive recognition of female contributions, this book stands at the forefront of contemporary discussion. More than a mere compilation, Breaking the Bronze Ceiling epitomizes a movement. The book comprehensively assesses the portrayal of women in public art and offers a fervent plea to address the severe underrepresentation of women in memorials.
Edited by Valentina Rozas-Krause and Andrew M. Shanken. Contributors: Carolina Aguilera, Manuela Badilla, Daniel E. Coslett, Erika Doss, Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy, Daniel Herwitz, Katherine Hite, Lauren Kroiz, Ana María León, Fernando Luis Martínez Nespral, Pía Montealegre, Sierra Rooney, Daniela Sandler, Kirk Savage, Susan Slyomovics, Marita Sturken, Amanda Su, Dell Upton, Nathaniel Robert Walker, and Mechtild Widrich.
Speaker: Valentina Rozas-Krause, Harvard Radcliffe fellow 2023-2024 and Assistant Professor in Design and Architecture, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile.
Respondents: Patricio del Real, Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. Paul M. Farber, Director, Monument Lab. Sanderijn Cels, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard University
Valentina Rozas-Krause is an assistant professor in design and architecture at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, in Chile and a 2023-2024 Radcliffe fellow. At Radcliffe, Rozas-Krause is working on “Memorials and the Cult of Apology,” which examines the role that memorials play in symbolic and material reparation after political conflicts.
She is an architect and a historian of the built environment who focuses on global cultural practices across the Americas and Europe. Her most recent publications include the essay “Decolonizing Architecture?” in ARQ (2022) and the coedited Breaking the Bronze Ceiling: Women, Memory, and Public Space (Fordham University Press, 2024).
Rozas-Krause recently completed a Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellowship at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan. She holds a PhD in architectural history from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s in urban planning and a BArch from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her research has been supported by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo, in Chile; the German Academic Exchange Service; the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley; a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship; and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.
Patricio del Real is an architectural historian who works on modern architecture and its transnational connections with cultural institutions, specifically focused in the Americas. He writes and researches on bilateral relationships between racial and cultural imaginaries, stories and ideologies in the 20th Century. He teaches on the ways in which modernism shaped global political and cultural power in such courses as Making Buildings Beautiful, Architecture and Authoritarianism and Mestizo Nations: Architecture in Mexico and Brazil. His new book: Constructing Latin America: Architecture, Politics, and Race at the Museum of Modern Art analyzes the way architecture exhibitions were mobilized as cultural weapons during the era of pan-Americanism. He's currently working on his next book, which rethinks the concept of utopia in architecture by looking at alternative building and spiritual practices in the 20th Century that developed responses to the universalist mandate of technological modernity, with a particular emphasis on Chile's Valparaiso School of architecture.
Paul M. Farber's research and curatorial projects explore transnational urban history, cultural memory, and creative approaches to civic engagement. He is the author of A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) which tells the untold story of a group of American artists and writers (Leonard Freed, Angela Davis, Shinkichi Tajiri, and Audre Lorde) who found refuge along the Berlin Wall and in Cold War Germany in order to confront political divisions back home in the United States. He is also the co-editor with Ken Lum of Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia (Temple University Press, 2019), a public art and history handbook designed to generate new critical ways of thinking about and building monuments. Additionally, Farber has edited a new critical edition of photographer Leonard Freed’s Made in Germany (Steidl Verlag, 2013), co-edited a special issue of the journal Criticism on HBO's series, The Wire (Wayne State University Press, 2011), and contributed essays and advised the production of visual culture books including Leonard Freed's This Is the Day: The March on Washington (Getty Publications, 2013), Nathan Benn's Kodachrome Memory: American Pictures 1972-1990 (powerHouse, 2013), and Jamel Shabazz's Pieces of a Man (ArtVoices, 2016).
In addition to his work with Monument Lab, Farber also serves as Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Public Art & Space at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. He was curator of Points of Connection (2020), Making Home Movies (2019), the traveling exhibition The Wall in Our Heads: American Artists and the Berlin Wall (2014–2016) and Stephanie Syjuco: American Rubble (2014). Farber earned a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan and a BA in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.
Sanderijn Cels specializes in strategy, social change, and collective memory. A historian by training, her research and teaching focus on strategic challenges and choices facing change agents who engage in public problem-solving and promote justice. As an adjunct lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, she currently teaches two graduate courses: Reckoning with History: Collective Memory, Public Leadership and the Politics of Remembrance and Sparking Social Change through Arts & Culture. She also teaches in multiple executive education programs at Harvard University and around the world. Her scholarly work has been published in peer- reviewed journals, including The Leadership Quarterly and Political Psychology. She is the first author of Agents of Change: Strategies and Tactics for Social Innovation (Brookings Institution Press, 2012) and seven other books. Cels received her Ph.D. degree in Social Sciences (no corrections) from Loughborough University (UK) and a master’s degree in history (with honors) from Leiden University (the Netherlands). A specialist in adult learning and interactive teaching, Cels has authored or co-authored over 40 teaching cases. She also facilitates case writing and teaching workshops for faculty and trainers about the Harvard case method.
Presented in collaboration with the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative.