Dr. Stathis Yeros, Architecture

Name:

Dr. Stathis Yeros

Title:

Assistant Professor

Department:

Architecture

Describe your research in about 200 words.

I am an urban historian and designer researching how space affects and is affected by struggles for social justice. I have published on urban theory and queer ecology, focusing on the spaces that queer and transgender people have historically inhabited in the United States, highlighting what lessons they hold for designers and planners. My work uses the lens of “queer insurgent citizenship” to rework the meaning of diversity and inclusion in the built environment as a set of rights rather than accommodations and reclaim architectural space away from market-driven development. This is the subject of my first book, Queering Urbanism: Insurgent Spaces in the Fight for Justice (University of California Press, 2024). My second book project investigates queer and trans spaces in the U.S. Deep South. Structured as a series of itineraries through Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, it draws on archival research, interviews, and fieldwork to trace how LGBTQ+ communities create and defend space in contexts shaped by both cultural resistance and institutional repression. I ask: how do LGBTQ+ people refuse assimilation? How do built environments inform insurgent cultural identities? And how do queer politics engage—and contest—state power to affirm the right to inhabit space otherwise?

What’s the most interesting thing you have learned from a student?

That mycelium can be used as a structural material in building enclosure.