Emily Gunzburger Makaš

Faculty Research Connections Profile

Makaš’s research focuses on connections between memory and identity and the built environment. She is interested in architecture, urbanism, heritage, commemoration, and politics.

Most of her career has focused on Southeastern Europe and her recent work, which she has presented extensively at conferences, explores relationships between museums and urban and national identities in Sarajevo and Mostar. She is currently finishing up a monograph on commemoration, heritage reconstruction, and public space in Bosnia-Hercegovina titled Urban and National Identities and the Rebuilding of Mostar (forthcoming from Routledge). She is also currently editing the volume Planning Eastern European Capital Cities, 1945-1989 (forthcoming from Routledge). Her other key publications include the edited volume Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires: Planning in Central and Southeastern Europe (Routledge, 2010, co-edited with T.D. Conley) and Architectural Conservation in Europe and the Americas (Wiley, 2011, co-authored with J.H. Stubbs). 

She has also turned closer to home and is working on community-engaged research exploring race and identity in Charlotte and beyond. Last spring the students enrolled in her museums seminar – which was co-taught with CoA+A Director of Galleries, Adam Justice – researched, designed, and installed an exhibition at the Levine Museum of the New South titled the “Legacy of Lynching.” This exhibit explored lynching cases in Mecklenburg County within the local and national context of the early 20th century. The exhibition was in partnership with the Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative, whose Memorial to Peace and Justice has also been the subject of Emily’s critical analysis. Currently, she is working with research assistants on an exhibition and catalog exploring the representation and celebration of African-American identity in the museum and cultural projects of the late North Carolina architect, Phil Freelon.

At the School of Architecture, her teaching relates to her research interests and includes upper-level history seminars on topics on Museums, Adaptive Reuse, Capital Cities, and Architecture and National Identity. Makaš has also taught a Historiographic Methods course as well as the Writing Architecture course.  She advises students in the Minor in Architectural History and Criticism.  In addition, she teaches the required History of Architecture survey courses. Makaš has co-led study abroad programs to Berlin (Spring 2010, Summer 2018) and Central European Capital Cities (Summer 2012).

Makaš has a Ph.D. in the History of Architecture and Urbanism from Cornell University (2007), a Masters in Historic Preservation from Columbia University (1997), and a Bachelor's in History from the University of Tennessee (1995). Visit Website.

Explore HER recent work