Y.L. Lucy Wang is an architectural historian, curator, and educator researching Asia’s empires from maritime exchange to postcolony, with a particular interest in land administration and scientific knowledge. Her current book project, Contagious Places, Curative Spaces: Disease and Architecture in Modern China, 1894–1949, examines biomedicine as a throughline in the architecture of greater China, broadly and diasporically defined. Via building codes, hospital construction, and modernist Chinese gardens, she asks how medical experts and professional architects managed outbreaks and modulated between tradition and modernity in the age of germ theory.
Wang received her Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology. Her research has been supported by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Dumbarton Oaks, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, which awarded her the 2024 Carter Manny Writing Award. In 2021–2022, she was part of the curatorial team of MoMA’s The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985, and she has also held positions at Architizer, the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning, and COOKFOX Architects.
Publications
“Zhang 瘴, Shu 暑, and the Traveling Embassy: Avoiding Heat at the Mountain Resort of Emperor Qianlong.” Thresholds 51 (May 1, 2023): 14–25.
“‘Masters in Our Own House’: Architecture in the Visual Culture of the Bandung Conference, 1955.” Post: Notes on Art in a Global Context, June 8, 2022.
“From Garrisoned District to Chinese Town: Land and Boundaries at the Kowloon Walled City, 1898-1912.” Architectural Histories 10, no. 1 (May 4, 2022): 1–24.
