Prof. Dr. Emily Pugh

Prof. Dr. Emily Pugh

Foto: privat

Foto: Chris Edwards

pughemil@hu-berlin.de

Emily Pugh received her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, where she focused on both postwar architecture and digital humanities. From 2010 to 2014, Pugh served as the inaugural Robert H. Smith Postdoctoral Research Associate, with special responsibilities for digital humanities projects at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Since 2014, Pugh has led the Digital Art History team at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), overseeing research activities in connection with technology initiatives. Her expertise within digital art history centers on the digital media of art history and its related infrastructures, which encompasses the digitization of physical materials, 3D scanning, computer vision, as well as collections metadata and its related workflows and processes. Within architectural history, Pugh focuses on postwar architecture in Europe and the US and on forms of architectural representation, including moving image media, architectural models, and digital design files.

Academic qualifications 

  • PhD Art History, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Supervised by Prof Kevin Murphy. 2008
  • BA Art History, DePaul University, Chicago. 1998

Featured publications

2014: Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7zwbqb

2015: “‘From ‘National Style’ to ‘Rationalized Construction’ Mass-Produced Housing, Style, and Discourse in the East German Journal Deutsche Architektur, 1956–1964,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, no 1 (March 2015). https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2015.74.1.87

2020: “Art History Now: Institutional Change and Scholarly Practice.” Transformation of Institutions. Special issue of International Journal of Digital Art History 4 (November 2020), https://doi.org/10.11588/dah.2019.4.63448.

2022: “Integrating Digital Humanities with Art-Historical Practice.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2022, eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2022 (forthcoming).

Professional projects

At the GRI, Pugh is the co-lead of several projects including Understanding the Architectural Model, an exploration of how 3D scanning technology might be leveraged to broaden access to the GRI’s collection of architectural models and PhotoTech, which explores the past and future of imaging technologies within art history. She is also a co-lead of Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles, a project which combined research activities with the digitization of a corpus of about 700,000 images, and is co-editor of a forthcoming digital publication, titled Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: City, Archive, Image, Artist. In addition to these activities, Pugh serves on the advisory board of the Center of Virtual Material Studies, within the Department of Art History at Penn State University. She is Editor for the Multimedia Reviews section of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and serves on the Editorial Board for the Society of Architectural Historians’ Archipedia, an online encyclopedia of the US built environment.

Conferences and talks

2019: Clark Art Institute Colloquium
Co-organizer: “Virtual/Material: What Matters in Art History,” with Elizabeth Mansfield (Head, Department of Art History, Penn State University)

2021: Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, “Art History Futures: At the Junction of the Digital and Material Turns,” Courtauld Institute of Art
Paper: Digital Imaging as Disciplinary Practice: Photography and Art History

2022: ICOMOS Erich-Mendelsohn Symposium; Berlin, Germany
Paper: “In the Shadow of Expressionism: Erich Mendelsohn in the 1950s and 1960s”

2022: Building Data: Architecture, Memory and New Imaginaries, 9th Annual Jaap Bakema Study Centre Conference,
Paper: “Slides, Software, Data, Drawings: The Frank Gehry Papers as Hybrid Architectural Archive”

Grants and awards

2019: Visiting Researcher, Center for Digital Humanities Research, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University

2019: Visiting Fellow, Centre for Architecture Theory Criticism History, School of Architecture, University of Queensland; project: “The Architectural Image in the Digital Age: Understanding Buildings in 3D”

2020: Terra Foundation Academic Events Grant, “Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles” digital publication workshop (co-Principal Investigator with Zanna Gilbert and Andrew Perchuk)

Arnheim – Lecture am 23.01.2023