UCLA AUD announces appointment of Samaa Elimam as Assistant Professor of Architecture

UCLA Arts and the Department of Architecture and Urban Design (UCLA AUD) are pleased to announce the appointment of Samaa Elimam as Assistant Professor of Architecture, effective July 2023.

Elimam’s research examines the intersection of technology, empire, and environment, with a focus on infrastructural landscapes. Her recent work investigates cultures of engineering and land surveying in the Nile Valley under Ottoman rule, particularly in Egypt and Sudan. Previous research and teaching topics have explored rival regimes of technical knowledge, including the history of public utility, optimization, and aesthetics in the design of public works. She is currently working on a book project and exhibition on surveying techniques and the production of the past in the Nile Valley during the nineteenth century.

"As a University of California graduate, I am honored to be back in the vibrant intellectual environment of a public research university alongside colleagues I greatly admire," Elimam says. "I've already been so inspired by the creative energy of the students and community at AUD, and I'm thrilled to continue exploring dialogues between historical research and design among such great company in this exhilarating city."

This Fall at UCLA AUD, Elimam is leading a critical studies seminar, "Infrastructural Acts: Environment, Design, and Empire," positing that infrastructure, rather than a hidden, neutral technology outside the domain of designers, is both a material thing and a political category with a long history.

"Through infrastructure, the modern world and its dominant systems of knowledge were built and sustained," Elimam writes in the course brief. "Infrastructural acts, therefore, shift our focus from infrastructure as technical artifact to the infrastructural as descriptive property. Infrastructure grounds architecture and is, itself, a form of architecture."

Elimam’s work has been supported by grants from the Society for the History of Technology, the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, among others. She was a visiting studio instructor at the American University in Cairo in 2014-2015 and has practiced architectural design at offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Cairo.

Elimam holds a PhD in Architecture from Harvard University, an MArch with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a BA in Architecture with highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley.

Elimam joins three other new faculty members appointed at UCLA's School of the Arts and Architecture (UCLA Arts) this July: Gelare Khoshgozaran at the Department of Art; Romi Ron Morrison at the Department of Design Media Arts; and Ayasha Guerin at the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.