Applications due December 1, 2020.
Please email applications to editors@averyreview.com with the subject line “Guest Editor.”
The Avery Review, a journal of critical essays on architecture published by the Office of Publications at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, is calling for candidates to apply to be the Avery Review’s 2021 Guest Editor (formerly the Editorial Fellow). The Guest Editor will commission and develop essays based on their interest, will contribute their own essay, and will take part in our regular editorial process, including for our annual Essay Prize. They will likely be a recent graduate (or will soon be graduating) from an architectural degree program—but there are no explicit requirements. The Guest Editor will receive a stipend.
Should you be interested, please send us:
– Brief CV (two pages maximum)
– Contact information for two potential references
– A cover letter that discusses your particular editorial interests and topics you might want to pursue
Candidates need not be located in the United States. The Avery Review aspires to broaden the diversity of voices in publishing, to support a wide range of perspectives on what constitutes architectural thought, and to encourage writers pursuing underexplored ideas. We welcome applicants who illuminate architecture’s blind spots, who oppose its many complicities, who resist its production of norms and its participation in spatial violence, and who champion a more open, more equal built environment. To that end, the Guest Editor is encouraged to pursue a particular editorial project or area of concentration, which should be detailed in the application cover letter.
Our current 2020 Guest Editor, Desirée Valadares, shifted the Avery Review’s geographical focus to current and former outlying US territories and possessions. She commissioned essays and cultivated relationships with geographers, landscape architects, activists and art/architectural historians from the Pacific, the Caribbean and the Arctic whose research engages land, empire and territory. Essays from this collection focus on island, archipelagic and oceanic environments and feature topics that range from US militarization, settler colonialism, resource extraction, Indigenous epistemologies, and anti-colonial performance in Hawai'i, Okinawa, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
In 2019 Guest Editor Elsa MH Mäki commissioned new writing by Indigenous scholars whose work and community responsibilities articulate the stakes of design and building in this era, like confronting what it means to be included in the diversity economy. On the whole, these contributions meditated on two crucial questions: What changes when Indigenous thinkers and practitioners of architecture are supported in presenting their work as critical and timely considerations for the field? What are the responsibilities of writers and editors today, in architecture and beyond, to honor collective and community-focused work rather than modes of intellectual production that privilege individual voices at a limited set of institutions over all others?
In 2018, Guest Editor Imani Day cultivated an editorial project deeply rooted in contemporary Detroit and in the city’s rich theological, racial, and pedagogical history. Each essay shed light on sites and practices, whether at the spiritual, the urban, or the educational scale, with profound and strategic implications for the future of the city and for architects and designers working in it. A special congratulations to contributor Ujijji Davis for being awarded a Bradford Williams Medal by the ASLA’s Landscape Architecture Magazine for her essay “The Bottom: The Emergence and Erasure of Black American Urban Landscapes” in issue 34.