Editors

Sarah Williams Goldhagen, a founding editor of Positions, is a historian, critic, and theorist of modern and contemporary architecture.  She is the author of Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism (Yale University Press); co-editor of Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (MIT Press), and she is the New Republic’s architecture critic. Goldhagen has a doctorate in Art History from Columbia University.  Before deciding to devote herself full time to writing and scholarship, she taught architectural history and theory at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design for ten years, and she has also taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and Vassar and Wellesley Colleges.  Goldhagen’s scholarly work examines the discursive formation and reformulations of modernism, both in general and as they are manifested in the work of individual architects. Her current scholarly project is grounded in the notion of architecture as embodied experience.  Goldhagen’s criticism covers a wide range of topics on the art, practice, and politics of architecture and urbanism, considering broad themes such as the relationship of architecture to landscape, architecture to art, and infrastructure; and analyzing the work of individual architects such as Rem Koolhaas, Thom Mayne, Jean Nouvel, and Peter Zumthor. She serves on the board of directors of the Society of Architectural Historians, and on the editorial board of Architecture Boston.

Cor Wagenaar, a founding editor of Positions, is a historian and critic of modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism, and his many books include Prosperity in the Making: The Reconstruction of Rotterdam 1940-1953 (De Hee), Happy: Cities and Public Happiness in Postwar Europe (NAi Publications) and The Architecture of Hospitals (NAi Publications).  Wagenaar studied history at the University of Groningen.  Several of his books examine the reconstruction of the Netherlands after World War II: one on Groningen, one on Rotterdam, and, together with Koos Bosma, an overview of reconstruction projects in the Netherlands between 1940 and 1960.  Wagenaar’s extensive research into the intellectual environment of J.J.P. Oud culminated in a book on post-war urbanism and collective utopias, in which he expanded his frame of reference to include not only western but also central and eastern Europe; this expanded field of interest also provided the impetus for his subsequent publication, Happy. Since 1996, he has also written extensively on the design of health care and treatment facilities. Wagenaar is assistant professor at the University of Delft, co-founder of Foundation Architecturalia, member of the advisory board of the Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. He is currently working on a monograph on 250 years of urbanism in the Netherlands.

Claire Zimmerman joined the editorial staff of Positions in Fall 2009. She recently edited Studies in British Art volume 21, which is titled Neo-Avant-Garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond, (Yale Center for British Art and Paul Mellon Centre, forthcoming 2010) with Mark Crinson. Her monograph on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe came out in 2006; more recent essays in AAFiles, Perspecta, OASE and the forthcoming book, Looking after Siegfried Kracauer explore related projects on modern architecture and its representation. Zimmerman is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, following teaching appointments at Yale School of Architecture, Syracuse University, Parsons School of Design, and Florida A&M University. Her research activities have included scholarly projects in preparation for exhibitions as the Yale Center for British Art and the Museum of Modern Art.

Jana Cephas is the Managing Editor of Positions. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in the history and theory of architecture and urbanism at Harvard University, where she studies the impact of early twentieth century industrial urbanism on modernist aesthetics.