Anna Vallye

Anna Vallye is a scholar of modern architecture. She is especially interested in how twentieth-century regimes of political administration and governance in Europe and America influenced the professional identities of architects and planners, their work, and the organization of the urban environment. Vallye is currently at work on a book titled Model Territories: German Architects and the Shaping of America’s Welfare State, about the American careers of émigré architects Walter Gropius, Martin Wagner, and Ludwig Hilberseimer, and their contributions to urban planning. 

She is the director and editor of Mapping Urban Renewal in New London, 1941-1975 (Connecticut College, 2020), a collaborative student-faculty-staff digital public history project that explores urban renewal and highway construction in New London, CT through archival documentation, interactive mapping, and resident recollections. This ongoing research project was seeded by an Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Research for the Public Good Grant from The Council of Independent Colleges. Vallye also edited the related print volume, Urban Renewal and Highway Construction in New London, 1941-1975 (New London County Historical Society, 2021). 

As a 2022-2023 Digital Scholarship Fellow, she is preparing to launch an expanded and redesigned version of Mapping Urban Renewal in New London, which will feature multimedia narratives based on oral history interviews with New London residents.

Vallye has a notable background in curatorial practice. She curated Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis (Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museo Correr, Venice, 2013-2014), the catalogue for which was awarded the 2014 Dedalus Foundation prize for its scholarship of modernism. She has worked at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and as an intern, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Vallye's research has been funded through the NOMIS Fellowship at eikones—Center for the Theory and History of the Image, University of Basel, Switzerland; the Junior Fellowship in the Mellon Humanities, Urbanism and Design Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania; the Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Washington University in St.Louis; and the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellowship at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Like her scholarship, Vallye’s courses locate architectural history in a broad social and intellectual context, linking it to multiple fields of study. She encourages students to explore how the built environment influences social life in all its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. At Conn, she is a faculty fellow of The Ammerman Center for Art and Technology and affiliated faculty in the American Studies Program and the Slavic Studies Program. 

Courses Taught

ARC/AHI 103 CC: Building Cultures

ARC/AHI/AT/AMS 473: Urban Renewal in America: New London

ARC/AHI 470: Time Capsule: New London

ARC/AHI 225: Between Art & Industry: The Bauhaus School of Design

ARC/AHI 273: History of City Planning

ARC/AHI 274: Case Studies in Modern Architecture

ARC/AHI 469: Modern Architecture Faces the Metropolis

ARC/AHI 375: The Architectural Imaginary: Encounters Between Art and Architecture

Selected Recent Publications

Books

Urban Renewal and Highway Construction in New London, 1941-1975, edited by Anna Vallye. New London, CT: New London County Historical Society, 2021.

Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis, edited by Anna Vallye. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. With contributions by Christian Derouet, Maria Gough, Stuart Liebman, Spyros Papapetros, and Jennifer Wild.

Léger 1910-1930: La visione della città contemporanea, edited by Anna Vallye. Venice: Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and Milan: Skira editore, 2014.

Digital Humanities Scholarship 

Mapping Urban Renewal in New London, 1941-1975, Connecticut College, 2020.

Time Capsule: New London, Linda Lear Center Digital Collections and Exhibitions, Connecticut College, 2019.

Essays

“On the Diagrammatic Rationality of Hilberseimer’s Planning.” In Architect of Letters: Reading Hilberseimer, edited by Florian Strob. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2022.

“Planning Problems: Data Graphics in the Education of Architects and Planners at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the 1940s.” In Architectural Education Through Materiality: Pedagogies of 20th-Century Design, edited by Elke Couchez and Rajesh Heynickx, 85-105. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021.

“’Lost City’: Public Housing, Urban Renewal, and Community in New London, Connecticut" (Part 1 & 2), PLATFORM (1 March & 8 March 2021).

“’Balance-Sheet’ City: Martin Wagner and the Visualization of Statistical Data,” Journal of Urban History 46 (January 2020): 334-363.

"Bauhaus.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, edited by Kevin Murphy. New York: Oxford University Press, 15 June 2020.

“From Siedlung to Township: The Martin Wagner-Walter Gropius Collaboration at Harvard, the 1940s.” In Dust & Data: Bauhaus Trajectories in 100 Years of Modernism, edited by Ines Weizman, 480-494. Leipzig: Spectorbooks, 2019.

“Gyorgy Kepes’s ‘Universities of Vision’.” In Émigré Design Cultures: Histories of the Social in Design, edited by Elana Shapira, 175-190. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

“Léger envoie un pneumatique à Cendrars.” In Fernand Léger: Le Beau est partout, edited by Arianne Coulondre, 37-46. Metz: Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2017.

“Between the Easel and the Mural: On the Social Ambitions of Painting in Space.” In Fernand Léger: Painting in Space, edited by Katia Baudin, 50-55. Cologne: Museum Ludwig, 2016.

Major or minor in art history.

Major or minor in architectural studies. 

History That Does Not Exist

A research team is exploring the impact of redevelopment on Conn’s host city.