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

Photo: Danish Saroee
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.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.