Feb 19

Kimberly Elman Zarecor talk, "The Socialist City & Its Afterlives"

Tue, February 19, 2019 • 5:00pm - 6:30pm (1h 30m) • Leighton 304 - new location!

This year's annual European Studies public talk will be presented by Professor Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Iowa State, 'The Socialist City and its Afterlives in Post-Socialist Europe.'

PLEASE NOTE  NEW DATE: TUESDAY, FEB 19th!
NEW LOCATION: LEIGHTON 304
!

An architectural historian, Professor Zarecor studies historical and contemporary architecture in the former Czechoslovakia. Her book, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960, focuses on the intersection of architects, housing design, and the state apparatus in the early years of Communist Party rule. It follows the development and deployment of standardized mass-housing types like prefabricated structural panel buildings and examines the relationship between communism and architecture.

In a current on-going project she explores the postwar development of Ostrava, a Czech coal and steel industrial city dating back to the early nineteenth-century. She received a 2011-12 Faculty Fulbright in the Czech Republic and a 2013 Erasmus Mundus Fellowship to pursue this research.

In September 2017, she started as the Principal Investigator on a new NSF-funded project about rural Iowa communities inspired by her research on Ostrava as a shrinking post-industrial Czech city. Looking at small and shrinking rural communities in Iowa, she and her research team are studying seven Iowa towns that are losing people while also protecting the quality of life for current residents. Using the concept of 'shrink-smart' from European work on this phenomenon in large cities, the research breaks new ground by asking what smart shrinkage looks like in rural places and considering how these towns can make good decisions about their futures even as they lose population. Project website. A full list of her many publications can be found on her CV

This talk is free and open to the public, and everyone is welcome to attend.

Event Contact: David Tompkins

Event Summary

Kimberly Elman Zarecor talk, "The Socialist City & Its Afterlives"
  • Intended For: General Public, Students, Faculty, Staff

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