Elliott Sturtevant: Business Trips: Architecture, Travel, and Trade in an Age of Empire
Join us Thursday, October 23rd at 2 PM for the third lecture in the Paul Cejas Lecture Series as the Department of Architecture’s very own Professor Elliott Sturtevant presents:
BUSINESS TRIPS: Architecture, Travel, and Trade in an Age of Empire
About Elliott Sturtevant
Elliott Sturtevant studies the history of architecture, infrastructure, and urbanization in North America since the eighteenth century. His work sits at the intersection of architectural and urban history with the histories of technology, business, and the environment.
Elliott received his Bachelor of Science in Architecture from McGill University, Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto, and Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he wrote a dissertation on the architecture of U.S. imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. Before joining FIU, Elliott was a 2023–24 Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University.
His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, Itinerario, Architectural Theory Review, Thresholds, and Pidgin. He currently serves as co-editor of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative’s online platform, we-aggregate.org.
His dissertation, “Empire’s Stores: The Architecture of Conveyance and Corporate Imperialism in America, 1890–1930,” examines how graphic methods and the architecture of American businesses acted as agents of corporate-led territorial and economic expansion. Challenging narratives that emphasize the nineteenth century’s technological “annihilation of space and time,” it highlights how modern enterprises used media practices to exploit spatial and temporal unevenness. Focusing on the networks—both visual and physical—that linked labor, resources, and infrastructure, the study explores communication and distribution systems ranging from diagrams to steamships and power lines. By analyzing four firms operating across U.S. borders, it argues that “American” corporate architecture both shaped and profited from imperial formations, redefining geographic and economic boundaries in the process.
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