Kristina Borrman
Assistant Professor
kristina.borrman@wsu.edu
Daggy Hall 311
PO Box 642220
Pullman, WA 99164-2220
Kristina Borrman is a cultural historian working at the intersection of built-environment history, art history, and the history of material culture. Broadly speaking, Borrman’s scholarship focuses on the relationship between the built environment and the instantiation of social identity in the modern world. By approaching 20th-century world history within the context of architecture, she examines everyday life—the ethics of ordinary choices— to reveal ways in which race, class and space are mutually constitutive.
Her current research explores the architects who fought to desegregate public housing in the pre-civil rights era. The Open Housers: The Architects Who Struggled to Desegregate Public Housing takes a fresh look at public housing by centering the architects who dreamt of housing equity at their drafting tables. By exploring built and unbuilt projects, this book recovers the experimental communities that architects created in their pursuit of diverse housing for diverse people. Kristina is in the final stages of editing her book manuscript.
Borrman’s scholarship has been supported by fellowships, residencies, and research grants from the Huntington Library, the Washington State University New Faculty Seed Grant, UC Humanities Institute Dissertation Research Grant, Gunnar Birkerts Fellowship in Architectural History (University of Michigan), American Heritage Center Research Fellowship, Bancroft Library Graduate Summer Research Award, and the John Nolen Research Award (Cornell University).
Select publications:
“Choose Coziness, Clutter, and Color: June Jordan’s Instructions for Children in Public Housing,” Winterthur Portfolio (in press)
Education
Ph.D. Art History, University of California, Los Angeles
M.A. Art History, University of California, Los Angeles
B.A. History of Art, University of California, Berkeley