Anna Mascorella is an architectural historian and curator. Her work examines the intersection of politics, class, race, and the built environment. Her primary focus is on twentieth-century Italy, yet she explores this intersection in a range of geographic and historical contexts. Her current book project, Restore, Displace, Appropriate: Confronting the Baroque in Fascist Rome, examines how Italy’s Fascist regime negotiated the architectural, sociocultural, and colonial legacies of the Baroque during its redesign of Rome. The research for this project has been supported by the Italian Art Society and the Cornell Institute for European Studies, and it received a Citation of Special Recognition from the Graham Foundation’s Carter Manny Award program. Her study on the reuse of Fascist-era architecture was published in the Routledge Companion to Global Heritage Conservation (2019).
Mascorella holds a Ph.D. in the history of architecture and urban development from Cornell University, a Master of Arts in art history from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Bachelor of Arts in art history and philosophy from Colorado State University. She has taught at the University of Colorado Denver’s College of Architecture and Planning and at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.
Most recently, Mascorella was the Temple Buell Curator of Architecture at the History Colorado Center in Denver, Colorado. There she expanded the museum’s contemporary architectural holdings – collecting oral histories and the work of John R. Henderson, Colorado’s first licensed Black architect, among other significant collections – and curated the major exhibition, Building Denver: Visions of the Capital City, which traces the competing forces that shaped Denver’s urban development.
At the University of Michigan, Mascorella is currently the Fishman Fellow at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and serves as a co-investigator on the Michigan-Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis.
