Sheila Crane
Education
BA, Smith College
MA, Northwestern University
PhD, Northwestern University
Biography
Sheila Crane’s research explores how urban landscapes have been shaped by histories of imperialism, settler colonialism, migration, occupation, militarization, conflict, and ongoing struggles for decolonization, as well as by everyday and often ephemeral practices of inhabitation, spatial appropriation, and urban reinvention. Much of her work has explored the liminal borderlands and enduring historical entanglements between Europe and North Africa. Her book, Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011 and received the 2013 Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.
More recently, her work has grappled with the political, material, environmental, and experiential histories of urban landscapes often described as informal settlements. Her book, The City in the Shadow of the Shantytown: A Critical History of the Bidonville, forthcoming with the University of Pittsburgh Press in Fall 2026, has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the 2025 David R. Coffin Publication Grant, and a CGII Award. In it, she challenges the presumptions written into the notion of urban informality, including its absolute opposition to the normative city, by tracing a significant thread within a global history that has yet to be written. The City in the Shadow of the Shantytown charts the emergence and consolidation of the idea of the bidonville (literally, “container city”), as it initially emerged in Casablanca in the decades following the establishment of the French Protectorate of Morocco in 1912, as well as the shifting urban landscapes that were categorized and targeted under this moniker across Morocco and Algeria. Through the examination of a series of critical inflection points, the book explores the bidonville as the subject of obsessive documentation and projection, as a living landscape, and as a concept that is both an artifact of colonialism and a formative site for decolonial thinking and action.
Crane has published widely, including in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Future Anterior, The Journal of Architecture, City and Society, Space and Culture, and Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art. Her article, “Algerian Socialism and the Architecture of Autogestion,” published in October 2019 in Architectural Histories (the international, peer-reviewed, open access journal of the European Architectural History Network), received the 2018–2019 Best Article Award. Recent publications and those currently in press include “Unmapping Land and Law in Casablanca,” Grey Room, 101 (Fall 2025): 62–81; “Bidonville Aesthetics & Genealogies of Modernity from Algiers, 1953/1963” in A Companion to French Art, edited by Natalie Adamson & Richard Taws (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2025); and “Oued Ouchayah as Transect and the Fractal Geometries of Autogestion,” French Studies, 78:4 (October 2024). Her editorial work has included terms as a book reviews editor for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2016–2019), and as a member of the editorial board for the University of Virginia Press (2015–2018) and the Journal of Architectural Education (2011–2014). She has also benefitted from residential fellowships she received from the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA; Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Study in America, where she held a Sidney J. Weinberg Foundation Fellowship in Architectural History & Preservation, and Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collections in Washington, DC, where she was a Mellon Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies.
Crane is on research leave for 2025–2026, during which time she will be a Visiting Fellow at King’s College and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge University (UK).
