Keynotes Spatial Humanities 2024

We are delighted to announce that this year’s keynote speakers will be Francesca Ammon (University of Pennsylvania) and Ross Purves (University of Zurich).

Telling Histories of Neighborhood Change via Historic Preservation

Francesca Russello Ammon is associate professor of City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. A social and cultural historian of the post-WWII built environment, she is the author of Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape, winner of the Lewis Mumford Prize for the best book in American planning history. She is currently writing a history of postwar preservation and urban renewal based upon the Philadelphia neighborhood of Society Hill. Her research also leverages the digital humanities to integrate photographs, oral histories, and other historical records into narratives of urban change through her website Preserving Society Hill and an NEH-funded exploration of Ed Ruscha’s photographic documentation of Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard.

Approaching landscape through language

Ross Purves is a professor of Geographic Information Science at the Department of Geography, University of Zurich. His research aims to address societally relevant research questions, with the fundamental aim of making theoretical, thematic and methodological contributions to Geographic Information Science. He is particularly interested in developing methods and answering questions through the use of unstructured information, often in the form of text. Much of this research in recent years has language captures information about landscape in a variety of European languages.