The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies

S.E. Eisterer is an Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the School of Architecture at Princeton University. In the year 2024-25 she is a Visiting Scholar in the Program for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and the Center for research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 

S.E.’s research focuses on spatial histories of dissidence, feminist, queer, and trans* theory in architecture, as well as the labor of social and ecological movements. Currently, she is working on the interdisciplinary history and translation project Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Architecture of Collective Dissidence, 1918–1989. The edited volume In the Daylight of Our Existence: Architectural History and the Promise of Queer Theory, which will be out with gta Press later this year. The volume illuminates methods and theories in writing about feminist and LGBTQIA+ spaces in architecture. S.E.’s writing has appeared in academic journals, books, and translations, among them Architectural Histories, Architecture Beyond Europe, Ediciones ARQ, Platform, Pidgin, and Log. 

Interdisciplinary collaborations in architecture and beyond are important to S.E.. Prior to arriving at Princeton, S.E. co-organized the Provost-sponsored Excellence through Diversity lecture series from 2018-2021 with Maya Alam, David Hartt, and Akira Drake Rodriguez at the University of Pennsylvania. With Torsten Lange, she co-founded the European Architectural History Network’s Architecture and Environment Group in 2017 and Queer Space Working Group in 2021. She is also a member of the Columbia based Insurgent Domesticities Group, founded by Anooradha Siddiqi.

S.E.’s scholarly work has been supported by the Botstiber Foundation for Austrian-American Studies, the Clarence Stein Fellowship for Landscape and Urban Studies, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Sachs Foundation for Arts Innovation, and the Viennese Mayor’s Office. She is the winner of the Carter Manny Award and the Bruno Zevi Award. S.E. was a Fellow at the Princeton-Mellon Initiative (2020-2021), the Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2017-2018), the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum (2021-2022) and the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Fellowship with ns-doku and the Karlsruher Institute of Technology. She holds a Mag.Arch. from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University in History of Architecture and Urbanism.