Ayala Levin

Associate Professor

Ayala Levin specializes in architecture and urban planning in postcolonial African states. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth century architecture and urbanism, non-western modernisms, and the production of architectural knowledge as part of north-south or south-south exchange. Her book Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2022) explores the export of Israeli architectural and planning models to Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Ethiopia in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, she is co-editor of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative collection of essays Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022), and the Journal of Architecture special issue on the Modern Village (2018). Her next research project explores how American architects and planners negotiated urban-rural dynamics in Africa from the mid 1950s to the late 1970s.

Levin’s research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF), and the Graduate Research Fellowship of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University, among others. She was a fellow at the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities, and the European Research Council project “Apartheid: The Global Itinerary” at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Levin is a board member of Aggregate and co-chaired a project for the Global History of Architecture Teaching Collaborative. She has previously taught at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, and Northwestern University.

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ayala.levin@aud.ucla.edu