About

Dell Upton served as a Distinguished Professor of Architectural History at UCLA, joining the faculty in 2008 after two decades of teaching at UC Berkeley. He is a historian specializing in architecture, material culture, and cities, with a longstanding interest in African-American history, architecture, and material culture. Early in his career, he studied landscapes of slavery. His scholarly contributions include publications such as What Can and Can’t Be Said (Yale University Press, 2015), Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (Yale University Press, 2008), and American Architecture: A Thematic History (Oxford, 2019). Currently, he holds the distinction of being a Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA for the period 2020-2026.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• History
• Computer Science
• Geography
• Archaeology
• Aesthetics
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Media studies
• Epistemology
• Anthropology
• Ancient history
• Visual arts
• Philosophy
• Law

Selected publications

• Memorial to the South Carolina Women of the Confederacy (Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl, 1909–1912), Columbia, South Carolina

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-05-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The dedication to Confederate women in Jefferson Davis’s <italic>The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government</italic> (1881) provoked a movement to erect monuments to “The Women of the Sixties.” South Carolina’s monument, by the renowned sculptor Frederick W. Ruckstuhl, relied on allusions to popular conceptions of the Roman triumph to signal women’s role. The result was an ambiguous conflation of traditional images of masculinity and femininity and defeat and victory that set his work off from the more conventional iconography of other Confederate women’s memorials.

  PublisherDOI

• Memorial to the South Carolina Women of the Confederacy (Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl, 1909–1912), Columbia, South Carolina

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-05-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Memorial to the South Carolina Women of the Confederacy (Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl, 1909–1912), Columbia, South Carolina

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-03-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR THE 1995 EDITION

  University of Pittsburgh Press eBooks · 2023-06-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Cultural Encounters, Local Practice, and Historical Process in the Ancient Middle East

  Intellect Books · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • History

  Islamic Architecture Today and Tomorrow - (Re)Defining the Field; Scholars and practitioners from the realm of 'Islamic architecture’ consider its changing nature and continued significance. Reflective essays address the meaning of ‘Islamic’ in built environments, and the geographical, chronological, disciplinary diversity of a dynamic field of study encompassing far more than mosques and tombs. 118 b/w illus.

  PublisherDOI

• Cultural Encounters, Local Practice, and Historical Process in the Ancient Middle East

  International Journal of Islamic Architecture · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • History
  • Aesthetics
  PublisherDOI

• As the Statues Fall

  Current Anthropology · 2021 · 10 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  In the wake of the global civil unrest following the brutal killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Tony McDade, Atatiana Jefferson, Aura Rosser, Elijah McClain, and so many others at the hands of police in the United States, #BlackLivesMatter protesters and their allies have critiqued the anti-Black racism imbued in the erection and maintenance of Confederate historical monuments. The legacy of social movements seeking to remove Confederate statues is long-standing. However, unlike in previous moments, what began as the forced removal of Confederate statues during protests has rippled to the removal of colonialist, imperialist, and enslaver monuments all over the world. In this webinar, scholars and artists shared their insights on the power of monumentality and the work they are doing to reconfigure historical markers. In the midst of this most recent turmoil, the Society of Black Archaeologists, in collaboration with the Wenner-Gren Foundation and SAPIENS and the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, hosted a panel discussion between scholars, activists, artists, and public historians titled “As the Statues Fall: A Conversation about Monuments and the Power of Memory.” This piece provides a look into that conversation and its highlights.

  PublisherDOI

• Dell Upton, Distinguished Professor of Architectural History, University of California, Los Angeles

  Panorama · 2019-01-11

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Panorama is a peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication dedicated to American art and visual culture (broadly defined). The journal is intended to provide a high-caliber international forum for disseminating original research and scholarship and for sustaining a lively engagement with intellectual developments and methodological debates in art history, visual and material cultural studies, and curatorial work.

  PublisherDOI

• A Questionnaire on Monuments

  October · 2018-08-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  “A Questionnaire on Monuments” features 49 responses to questions formulated by Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty: “From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers involving histories of racial conflict. How do these charged situations shed light on the ethics of images in civil society today? Speaking generally or with specific examples in mind, please consider any of the following questions: What histories do these public symbols represent, what histories do they obscure, and what models of memory do they imply? How do they do this work, and how might they do it differently? What social and political forces are in play in their erection or dismantling? Should artists, writers, and art historians seek a new intersection of theory and praxis in the social struggles around such monuments and markers? How might these debates relate to the question of who is authorized to work with particular images and archives?”

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Confederate Monuments, Public Memory, and Public History

  DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2018-06-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Dell Upton follows up on the theme of his current book, <em>What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South</em> (Yale University Press) by asking a team of individuals critically engaged with public art, memory, and the nation about the recent debates around Confederate monuments and efforts to recognize histories of lynching.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• John Michael Vlach

  2 shared

• Benjamin Kunkel

  2 shared

• Peter Nabokov

  2 shared

• Mary Praetzellis

  Santa Rosa Junior College

  2 shared

• Adrian Praetzellis

  2 shared

• Robert Easton

  2 shared

• Roger G. Kennedy

  2 shared

• Sarah Nuttall

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA (2020-2026)
• Distinguished Scholar of the Art Council