Sarah Wheat is currently a visiting scholar in the History of Architecture at Kassel University. Her research interests highlight cross-cultural interactions in architecture and design during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This includes issues of feminism, Orientalism, the globalization of “modernism,” the diaspora of German speaking architects before and during WWII to areas outside of the United States, and the interplay of scientific and spiritual understandings of architectural modernisms. She received her M.A. in Modern and Contemporary Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 where her thesis was titled “The Architect as Nomad: Bruno Taut’s Architekturlehre (1938).” Now a PhD candidate within the History of Art department at the University of Michigan, Sarah’s dissertation work is concerned with the intersection of Orientalism and international feminism within histories of architecture and design in the United States, Turkey, and Germany around 1900.

She has worked at Kulturprojekte Berlin and the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago. Her publications include a chapter in Expanding Dialogues of Diaspora: Manifestations of Middle Eastern Architecture in the Americas for the Intellect/University of Chicago Press’ Critical Studies in the Architecture of the Middle East series (forthcoming 2021). Recent conference presentations include “The Turkish Style Cosey Corner: Islamic Objects and Spaces in the American Parlor, 1885-1910” and “The Architectural Document: the Hudson Motor Car Company Factory Portfolio and the Albert Kahn Associates Archive.” She is a recipient of the Rackham Humanities Fellowship (2020/21) and the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies Fellowship (2019).