Profile picture for Laura diZerega

Laura diZerega

Roles:
Author, Copyeditor, Editor, Production Manager, Proofreader, Reader, Reviewer, Section Editor

Affiliation:

    • Independent Scholar, San Luis Obispo, California, USA

Biography

Laura received her doctorate in the history of art and architecture from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2021. Her research examines intersections of state bureaucracies and public architecture to consider how bureaucratic administration stimulates discursive spaces among diverse architectural stakeholders at the community, professional, and governmental levels. She is interested in the art and architecture of German lands in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, and her dissertation, under the direction of Richard Wittman, with Swati Chattopadhyay and Barry Bergdoll, examined Prussian state regulation of ecclesiastical architecture by Karl Friedrich Schinkel—with its unintended consequence of creating avenues for provincial publics to respond, and resist, official culture. Laura's work was recently included in Architecture Against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International, edited by Reinhold Martin and Claire Zimmerman (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), and, together with Richard Wittman, she co-chaired the session "Bureaucracy and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century. Europe and its Colonies: A New Paradigm" at EAHN 2024 in Athens, Greece. In addition to EAHN, Laura has presented talks at  meetings of the German Studies Association and the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. Laura is also an accomplished editor and has overseen the publication of numerous exhibition catalogues and scholarly monographs for the J. Paul Getty Museum and Getty Conservation Institute in her role as a project editor with Getty Publications. As an independent scholar and professional working outside of academia, Laura is passionate about robust open-access publications, born-digital scholarly resources, and the creation of publishing opportunities, both welcoming and rigorous, for non-traditional scholars.