Taubman College Łukasz Stanek joins the Taubman College faculty as a professor of architecture, with tenure, effective August 29, 2022. Stanek is a Senior Fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa, University of Ghana at Legon, Accra, Ghana. He is a historian of architecture, planning, and urbanism. His scholarship seeks to understand worldwide urbanization processes since World War II beyond their reduction to the consequences of the colonial encounter with Western Europe and the impact of Western-dominated “globalization.” In particular, he studies how urbanization in post-independence West Africa and the Middle East was shaped and reshaped by resources circulating in networks of socialist internationalism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and various forms of South-South collaboration.
Stanek’s teaching encompasses a wide range of international experience at prominent architecture schools. He is particularly adept at involving students in his path-breaking research and advanced research methodologies beyond the usual architectural history range. His first book, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (University of Minnesota Press 2011), redefined our understanding of an academic field’s most respected figure. His recently published second book, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton University Press 2020), engages with global transformations in architecture and urbanism from the original perspective of Eastern European initiatives in the developing world during the Cold War period.
In 2002, Stanek received his M.Sc. in architecture and urban planning from Kraków University of Technology, Poland, and his M.A. in philosophy from Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. He earned his Ph.D. in architecture in 2008 from Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. Stanek subsequently held multiple fellowship positions: teaching fellow at Berlage Institute (2008); research scholar at the Institut d’Urbanisme de Paris, Université Paris (2008); postdoctoral research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (2010); and A.W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art (2011-2013). He joined the faculty at The University of Manchester, United Kingdom, as a lecturer in 2012. Stanek was promoted to senior lecturer in 2016 and professor of architectural history in 2021.
