01.02.22

In Fall 2021, the Mellon Humanities, Urbanism and Design Initiative at Penn (H+U+D) was pleased to welcome two Junior Fellows and two Mellon Doctoral Dissertation Fellows for the 2021-22 academic year.

H+U+D Junior Fellows

Dr. Ewa Matyczyk and Dr. Alec Stewart were named H+U+D Junior Fellows for 2021-22. They were selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants from the humanities and design disciplines. In keeping with the mission of H+U+D to bring together scholars and students to explore cities at the intersection of the humanities and design, Dr. Matyczyk, an art historian, is being hosted by the Weitzman School of Design, and Dr. Stewart, an urban historian and geographer, is hosted by the School of Arts and Sciences. Both Junior Fellows will participate in the H+U+D Faculty Colloquium and teach interdisciplinary undergraduate seminars in their academic host departments in Spring 2022.

• Ewa Matyczyk

Ewa Matyczyk earned her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Boston University, where her doctoral work focused on public art in urban spaces of the former Eastern Bloc during the Cold War and post-socialist period. Her research interests include issues of memory, identity, public space, and the relationships that form between public art, the built environment, and their intersections with the theory and practice of everyday life. Her book project, Intervention, Memory, and Community: Public Art and Architecture in Warsaw Since 1970 examines a series of exhibitions, performative interventions, monuments, and public art initiatives. The book traces the political, social, and cultural transformations of the last five decades in Warsaw and considers how such changes are represented, omitted, and problematized in the urban landscape. In 2019 Ewa worked in the Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture where she researched the city’s commemorative landscape. She is also a dedicated educator who employs a pedagogy of care that foregrounds the interwoven values of community, generosity, and gratitude. She has taught at Boston University, Northeastern, Suffolk, Boston Architectural College, and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is appointed in the Department of Fine Arts (Weitzman School of Design).

• Alec Stewart

Alec Stewart, who earned his PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, is an urban historian and geographer whose work focuses on the relationships between placemaking and claiming, consumer culture, and urban citizenship in the commercial built environment. His book project examines how indoor swap meets came to anchor multiethnic communities in late-twentieth century Southern California. It contends that these marketplaces served not only as sites of material exchange but also as vital arenas where Asian, Latinx, and Black entrepreneurs and shoppers negotiated differences and forged solidarities across ethnic and class lines. Alec serves on the Vernacular Architecture Forum board, and last year he was a Mellon Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. He is committed to promoting equity and inclusion in the academy, having mentored first generation college students over several years as a Berkeley Connect Fellow. Before pursuing his doctoral studies, he worked as a city planner in Oakland, California and earned his master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Geography from George Washington University and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively. He is appointed in the Department of History (School of Arts and Sciences).

H+U+D Andrew W. Mellon Doctoral Dissertation Fellows

This fall, the initiative was also delighted to welcome two Doctoral Dissertation Fellows, Pavel Andrade and Kimberly Noronha. They will participate in the H+U+D Faculty Colloquium while advancing their own dissertation projects.

• Pavel Andrade

Pavel Andrade is Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His doctoral dissertation, “Patterns of Accumulation: Capital, Form, and the Spatial Composition of the Mexican Novel (1962-2017),” studies the relation between literary form and the spatialization of capital in the context of Mexico’s uneven transition from state-led industrialization toward a new export-oriented pattern of capital accumulation. His broader research interests include spatial literary studies, border and migration studies, and the novel’s countertopographical imagination.

Pavel holds graduate specializations in Latin American Studies and World History, an M.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). At Penn he has taught courses on literary analysis and Latin American cultural history with the Department of Romance Languages and the Lauder Institute’s Latin America Regional Program. In 2018 he co-founded Variations, an interdisciplinary working group focused on Marxism, critical theory, and literary theory. More recently, he founded the Mexican Studies Research Collective, an international network of scholars whose research focuses on Mexican literary and cultural studies. He is affiliated with Penn’s Wolf Humanities Center and the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies.

• Kimberly Noronha