Humanities and Arts
M. David Samson
Associate Professor
Department: Humanities & Arts
Professional Page
Office: Salisbury Laboratories, 14
Phone: +1-508-831-5370
Fax: +1-508-831-5932
samson@wpi.edu
Educational Background
- B.A., University of Chicago, 1980
- Ph.D, Harvard University, 1988
Research & Teaching Interests
19th and 20th century art and architecture; European and American architectural history, particularly 1870-1940; art patronage; intellectual history; American cultural history; historical preservation; history of the architectural profession in America history of industrial design
IQP Advising Interests
Redevelopment of urban areas; history; visual arts; history of built environments
Research
My chief interest, as an architectural historian and as a teacher, is how new styles or new philosophies of architecture can be convincingly explained to the wider culture—to people outside the originating group. I have recently completed a book manuscript that explains the spread of the German Bauhaus style of modern architecture in the context of theories of modernity that were used to justify it. The Americans who advocated German modernism in the 1930s are one of my long-standing interests. I am at work on studies of both the writings and the architectural projects of Philip Johnson, one of the Germans’ chief supporters, and I am doing archival research on the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, author with Johnson of the influential textbook The International Style (1932).
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