- Assistant Professor
- School of Design and Construction
Biography
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 project, Counter-redlining: Hidden Histories of Black Resistance in American Neighborhoods, tells the stories of seemingly ordinary people—a barber, insurance salesman, architect, and motel owner—who fought against redlining using the peculiar resources of their professions during the pre-civil rights era. Often described as the most devastating tool of segregation, redlining refers to the federally-sanctioned, discriminatory lending that systematically disenfranchised non-white neighborhoods in American cities between 1933 and 1968. Borrman’s history of “counter-redliners” offers a necessary corrective to top-down policy histories of redlining that neglect the everyday people who staged battles against redlining and won important victories in their respective cities.
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).
Selected Publications:
“Choose Coziness, Clutter, and Color: June Jordan’s Instructions for Children in Public Housing,” Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Winter 2023): 193-217. *Winner of the 2025 SAH Historic Interiors Article Award
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