Sam Dodd

Assistant Professor

Areas of Specialization: Modern Architectural History and Theory, Design Studies, American Material and Visual Culture, Social Practices in Art and Design

PhD University of Texas at Austin
Email: Samuel.Dodd@stonybrook.edu
Office: Staller Center for the Arts #4215

Sam Dodd is an architectural and design historian. His scholarship looks at everyday sites and objects within the American built environment, focusing on questions of social engagement, spatial justice, material and technological momentum, and vernacular experience. His writings have been published in Art Journal, Journal of Design History, Design Issues, and Journal of Architectural Education. Sam has received research funding from the Smithsonian Institution, National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, and the Humanities Institute at Pennsylvania State University.

Sam is currently working on two book projects. The first, All Eyes on Space: Television and the Architecture of Distant Sight (contracted with the University of Pittsburgh Press), recounts experiments in visual and performing art, building, and design that characterized the emplacement and spatialization of American television during the second half of the twentieth-century. It explains how the socio-spatial logics of “distant sight” have shaped our present-day concepts of time, distance, and materiality. His second book, The Weight of a Brick, takes up one of architectural history’s most durable, ubiquitous forms – the brick – to question how modern American systems of supremacy, empire, and reproduction accrue a type of material force that comes to over-determine our possible futures. In response, Sam considers the work of interdisciplinary artists and queer activists who take up bricks as sites for reconciliation and creative speculation.

Sam is a first-generation scholar-teacher. He received his PhD in Architectural History and Theory from the University of Texas at Austin and previously taught at the University of Arizona and Ohio University. At Stony Brook, Sam teaches courses on modern art, global architecture and design, and social practices in contemporary art.