Andrew Herscher

Andrew Herscher’s work endeavors to bring the study of architecture and cities to bear on struggles for rights, justice, and democracy across a range of global sites. He has advanced this study through a series of activist research collaboratives that he has co-founded, including the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective, Detroit Resists, and the Settler Colonial City Project. His collaborative research is augmented by scholarly work exploring the architecture of political violence, migration and settlement, colonial dispossession and anti-colonial resistance, and related topics. His books include Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2010), The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2012), Displacements: Architecture and Refugee (Sternberg Press, 2017), Spatial Violence (Routledge, 2016), co-edited with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, The Global Shelter Imaginary: IKEA Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), co-authored with Daniel Bertrand Monk, and Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan (University of Michigan Press, 2025). 

Herscher has a PhD in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning from Harvard University, a Master of Architecture from Harvard University, and a Bachelor of Arts in architecture from Yale University. Augmenting his appointment in the Architecture Program, he is a Faculty Associate of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program and Department of the History of Art.