Angela Wheeler

Angela Wheeler is a fourth-year PhD student at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Her research examines historic preservation principles and practices that emerged across the socialist world in the postwar period. After working with the International Council of Monuments and Sites as a Fulbright grantee in Tbilisi (2012-2013) and completing HUD surveys of Hawaii public housing, she completed an MSc in Historic Preservation at Columbia University (2016). Her thesis, Socialist in Form, National in Content, investigated official attempts to reconcile historic preservation with Soviet ideology in the Brezhnev era. She has published in Pidgin, Calvert Journal, Identity Studies in the Caucasus and Black Sea Region, and the Arctic Review on Law and Politics.
 

Angela’s recent projects include a Graham Foundation grant for “Indigenous Outsiders: Endangered Islamic Heritage in the Republic of Georgia,” an exhibition and publication documenting the wooden mosques of Georgia’s Muslim minorities (2018). Her chapter on mosques of Russia and the Caucasus appeared in Rizzoli’s Mosques: Splendors of Islam (2017) and she recently completed the Tbilisi volume for DOM’s Architectural Guides series (2020). She also organized “Commons: Public Spaces After Socialism,” an interdisciplinary conference hosted by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies