Architecture inscribes and reinscribes property regimes onto the surface of the earth. As tools of improvement and demarcation, buildings materialize otherwise abstract claims of property ownership. And in so doing, architecture also inaugurates the possibility of property destruction.

This symposium asks how property is made and unmade—not just through legal instruments or physical acts of seizure but also, crucially, through architectural objects and processes. It will bring together architectural historians with scholars of racial capitalism, colonialism, and law to illuminate new questions about how architecture and property are co-constituted across symbolic, social, spatial, and material registers. Presenters will address property’s making in actuarial assessment, hereditary compacts, domicile law, and the sedimentation of legal claims and property’s unmaking in sabotage, arson, and other acts of destruction.

Organized by Society of Fellows and Buell Fellows Sonali Dhanpal and Chelsea Spencer, with concluding remarks by Kalyani Ramnath (Columbia).

Speakers

Heba Alnajada is an assistant professor of global modern and contemporary architecture in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Boston University. Her research interests include refugee histories, cities, the history of the modern Arab world, Islamic studies, and (increasingly) property, law, and borders. Before joining BU, she was the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History at UC Davis. She received her PhD in Architectural History from the University of California, Berkeley.

Bench Ansfield is an assistant professor of history at Temple University and the author of Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City (W. W. Norton, 2025), which was named a best book of the year by the New York Times and Kirkus Reviews. They hold a PhD in American Studies from Yale University.

Lisa Haber-Thomson is a historian whose research addresses the spaces of law, with a focus on colonial and postcolonial state practices across the Atlantic world from the eighteenth century to the present. She is currently at work on a book manuscript about carceral architectures across England and its expanding empire. A second major project investigates the historical relationships between architecture and property law. Lisa is assistant professor of architectural history at Mount Holyoke College.

R. H. Lossin writes about labor history, American radicalism, and contemporary art. They are associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and the Executive Director of the Program on Law and Political Economy at Harvard Law School. Their first book, Sabotage: The Rise and Fall of a Revolutionary Idea, is under contract with Princeton University Press.

Bryan E. Norwood, PhD, is an architectural historian and an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on architecture and building practices in the United States and Atlantic World in the long nineteenth century. His first book Architectural Pursuits: Capitalism, Morality, and the Formation of an American Profession is forthcoming with Columbia University Press.

Bhavani Raman is an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Document Raj: Scribes and Writing in Early Colonial India (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and has authored essays on colonial property and recordkeeping practices. She is currently completing a book on the jurisprudence of rebellion in early colonial South Asia.

For in-person attendance (general public welcome), complete this form to RSVP. If you do not have an active Columbia ID card, please RSVP before noon on March 10, 2026 - you will receive an email from Columbia University Public Safety containing a QR code, which you will be asked to present along with a matching ID at campus gates. Please allow a few extra minutes to pass through campus security. Please note: 300S Buell Hall is reached by three flights of stairs; there is no elevator in the building.

For virtual attendance, register for the webinar here.