Shelley Hornstein

This is the philosophy of York University Professor of Architectural History and Visual Culture, Shelley Hornstein, and the reason she created these tours. These vacations began in 1996 when Shelley envisioned a cultural trip-as-retreat.

Shelley Hornstein is the recipient of the Walter L. Gordon Fellowship and publishes widely on the examination of architecture, memory, place and spatial politics in architectural and urban sites. Some of the themes she is exploring are “starchitecture,” Jewish topographies, architectural tourism, and department stores, malls and streetscapes of fashion. Her book entitled: Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place is forthcoming and her edited books include: Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art (McGill-University Press, 2000); Image and Remembrance: Representation and The Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2002), and Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust (NYU Press, 2003). Travel, Memory and Architecture have always been at the heart of her work and is now finding its way into a new manuscript she is preparing on Starlets and Starchitecture: Architectural Tourism, City Branding and the Gendered Legacy of Celebrity Buildings.

As Executive Director and Co-Founder of MOSAICA, she has co-developed the first online contemporary space devoted to Jewish culture, virtual space and diaspora. Elsewhere, her work appears in several anthologies and scholarly journals. She is on many international Advisory Boards and was Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociale, Paris, and at the University of Bologna.

A graduate of the Université des Sciences Humaines, Strasbourg, France, Professor Hornstein has taught at York University since 1985. Her courses include Memory and Place, Paris as Modernist Dream, The Celluloid City, No Place like Home, and The Metropolis Revisited. Prior to York University, she taught at Concordia and Laval Universities. She serves on the Executive of the City Institute of York Universityis a member of York’s graduate programs in Art History, Culture and Communications, and Social and Political Thought. She has served as Associate Dean, Co-Director of the Centre for Feminist Research, and twice Chair of Department of Fine Arts, Atkinson College.