Alexandra Quantrill is a historian of architecture and environment. Her scholarship concerns intersections between technology, aesthetics, energy, and political economy in the making of the built world. She has published in Architectural Theory Review, Grey Room, and the Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians. She has taught courses on the history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture at Cornell University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Parsons, and the University of Texas at Austin. Quantrill has received funding for her research from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Getty Research Institute.
At MacDowell she worked on her book project, Electric Women: Liberation, Constraint, and the Culture of Electrification in Modern Britain, for which she was awarded a 2022-2023 Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. The book traces how a group of women engineers, activists, and housewives consolidated an imaginary of female emancipation through the shift to electricity, and examines the manifold ways they engaged in debates surrounding women’s technical and domestic labor, housing design, the expansion of electrical infrastructures, and energy economy.
