David Sadighian

David Bijan Sadighian (Ph.D., 2023, history of art and architecture, Harvard University) is assistant professor of architecture at Yale University. He researches and teaches histories of the built environment with an emphasis on architecture’s intersections with empire, capitalism, and material culture. He is currently completing his first book, The World is a Composition: Beaux-Arts Design in the Age of Empire, which examines how the global circulation of design methods taught at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts shaped emerging institutions and practices of international order (c. 1870–1940). Beyond this research, David has published on topics including the architecture of nineteenth-century international finance, theories of public space, museum architecture, racial capitalism in Brazil, and professional design expertise as a form of currency. Support for his research and studies has been provided by the Social Science Research Council, Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (DFK Paris), American Historical Association, Krupp Foundation, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), and Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. David has an additional interest in curatorial work. He assisted in organizing retrospective exhibitions at Yale on Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Kevin Roche, and he served as a collection specialist in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) prior to his doctoral studies.