Jennifer Mack

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of Theory and History of Architecture, KTH Royal Institute of Technology,
Stockholm

Jennifer Mack completed a PhD in architecture, urbanism, and anthropology at Harvard University in
2012. She then held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala
University, and at KTH, with research on migrant urbanism and religious architecture. She holds an
MArch and MCP from MIT, a BA with honors from Wesleyan University, and became Docent in
Architecture at KTH in 2020.

Mack’s 2017 book, The Construction of Equality (University of Minnesota Press), received the
Margaret Mead Award from SfAA/AAA in 2018. In this diasporic architectural history, she traces how
Syriac Orthodox Christians transformed a Swedish city over five decades, challenging prevailing ideas
that linked building norms to social equality. Mack was co-editor, with Michael Herzfeld, of Life Among
Urban Planners (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and co-editor, with Sten Gromark and Roemer
van Toorn, of Rethinking the Social in Architecture (Actar, 2019). She is a member of the editorial board
of Thresholds and has published in journals such as American Ethnologist, Landscape Research, and
Public Culture. Mack’s research lies at the intersection between architectural history and anthropology,
with earlier projects receiving funding from Forte, the Graham Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Formas,
and Vetenskapsrådet, among others. She is particularly interested in how postwar European suburbs have
become symbolic spaces targeted for anxious political and planning actions (including large-scale renovations
and demolitions) and, simultaneously, sites of bottom-up environmental and social transformations.

As a Pro Futura Fellow, Mack develops the project “Public Modernism: Reports from the Welfare City” to
craft alternative narratives about modernist suburbs, countering their seemingly indelible legacies of “failure.”
Using interdisciplinary methods, Mack investigates dynamic environments across scales, spaces, and species.

Jennifer Mack is in residence at the Collegium in the academic year 2023-24.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2023-24.