Chelsea Spencer is a historian of modern architecture, architectural media, and economic life. Her current book project, The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building, traces the rise of general contracting in the United States during the long nineteenth century, a period known in legal history as the “age of contract.” The project shows how contracts came to be the fundamental medium linking architectural design to construction in the modern world and how this configuration was shaped by nineteenth-century thinking about freedom, risk, and value. Her second project proposes an architectural history of corruption, exploring its technical, aesthetic, and political dimensions.

Chelsea is the 2025–2027 Buell Center Research and Teaching Fellow and was previously a postdoctoral fellow in architecture at Rice University. She received a PhD in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture from MIT and an MDes from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Chelsea is also an editor. She has taught writing at the Pratt Institute, was the managing editor of Log, and cofounded a student zine at the GSD.

Her work can be found in Grey Room, Places Journal, and Log, as well as several edited volumes.