Eric Wycoff Rogers
Pembroke College, Cambridge, UK, CB2 1RF
ewr22@cam.ac.uk +1-510-326-1180
Overview
I am a PhD candidate in American history in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, a regular lecturer on the politics of desire, experimental architecture and the historical and contemporary practices of communal living in the United States and Britain, and a public humanities organizer, convener, curator and speaker.
Education
-University of Cambridge PhD candidate in American History, (to finish in Fall 2022)
-University of Cambridge Master of Philosophy in Architecture and Urban Studies, with hons., 2018
-Yale University Master of Environmental Design (M.E.D.), with awards, 2015
-California College of the Arts BFA in Interior Architecture, with distinction, 2013
Publications
-“The Men Behind the Girl Behind the Man Behind the Gun: Sex and Motivation in the American Morale Campaigns of the First World War,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, issue 31.2, May 2022.
-“Deprofessionalizing Architecture(al Theory): The Case for Anti-Work Politics” (book chapter), in Asymmetric Labors: The Economy of Architecture in Theory and Practice, Peggy Deamer, Aaron Cayer, Eric Peterson, et. al., eds. (Brooklyn, NY: The Architecture Lobby, 2016).
-“Professional Interests: The Development and Concerns of Professionalized Architecture in the U.S.,” ARPA Journal 5, “Conflicts of Interest,” 2016.
-“Sexual Racism in the Ranks: Morale and Assessments of Sexual Self-Control and Motivation Susceptibility in the Placement of African American Soldiers During the First World War,” submitted and under review by The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2022.
-“Subjective Recursivity in the Spatial Politics of London Gay Liberation Front Communes,” submitted and under review by GLQ (Lesbian and Gay Studies), 2022.
Awards, Honors and Funding
-Cambridge Trust Funding, awarded full funding for my PhD studies at Cambridge, 2018-2022.
-Bass Fellowship in Architecture, fully-funded competitive scholarship awarded to Yale alumni to study at Cambridge University for one year (tuition, travel + living stipend). 2017-2018 - $65,000.
-Clarke Chambers Fellowship, Social Welfare Archives, University of Minnesota, 2019.
-Sara Norton Travel Fund Recipient, archive travel funding from the Cambridge Faculty of History, 2019.
-Yale School of Architecture David Taylor Memorial Prize, for outstanding and relevant thesis research, 2015.
-Angello Donghia Foundation Interior Design Scholarship, for Montgomery BART Station redesign project completed in spring, 2012 design studio, 2012-2013- $30,000.
-Center for Art and Public Life Social Entrepreneur Impact Award 2013 recipient- $10,000 to build socially beneficial project (group submission).
-California College of the Arts Dean’s List- FA 2011- SP 2013.
Research
-Cambridge PhD Dissertation (projected to finish in 2022): The Men Behind the Girl Behind the Man Behind the Gun: Sex, Morale, and Motivation the United States Military During the First World War, 1917-1919
-Cambridge master’s thesis (2018): “Engaged Withdrawal:” Communal Living and Queer Spatial Politics in London’s Gay Liberation Front, 1971-1974
-Yale master’s thesis (2015): Progressive Cities: Planning, Reproduction and Power in and through Discourse on the American Metropolis, 1887-1945
Talks, Conferences, Interviews, and Public Humanities Work
-Conference and Workshop Papers:
“‘Utopia: It’s Complicated’: Experimentation, Para-Institutionalism, and the Remaking of Subjectivity in the San Francisco Communes,” UtopiAA 2.0 Conference, Architectural Association + Gray Area, San Francisco, August 2021.
“The Valences of Motivating Soldiers During the World Wars” (round table discussion moderator and participant) Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HoTCUS) conference, June 2021.
“The Men Behind the Girl Behind the Man Behind the Gun: Sex and Motivation in the American Morale Campaigns of the First World War,” paper presented in the Cambridge American History Workshop, October 2020.
“Sex, Motivation and Morale Among American Soldiers During the First World War,” paper presented to the Cambridge Gender and Sexuality History Workshop, University of Cambridge, October 2020.
“Better Homes; Better Citizens: the Home and the ‘Environmentalist’ Approach to Social Reform in 1920s America,” paper presented to the Cambridge Gender and Sexuality History Workshop, University of Cambridge, May 2018.
“Critical Hedonism(s) as a Pleasurable Alternative to Austerity,” given at Degrowth, Conviviality, Hedonism & Communalisms workshop, University of Hamburg, December 2017.
“Exploring New Economies of Space, Pleasure and Care,” paper presented to the Creative Cities working group, Stanford University, April 2017.
“The Right to the Creative City,” panel respondent, Stanford University, May 2017.
“Domestic Subjects: Better Homes in America and the Reproduction of Gender,” paper given at Domestic Subjects conference at UC Los Angeles, April 2017.
“Developing a Theory and Praxis of Urban Hacking,” given at the American Association of Geographers conference, March 2016.
“The Subjectivity of Green Gentrification,” paper presented at the Dimensions of Political Ecology conference, University of Kentucky, February 2015.
-Talks and Lectures:
“‘Utopia: It’s Complicated’: Experimentation, Para-Institutionalism, and the Remaking of Subjectivity in the San Francisco Communes” lecture presented at the “How to live together in Phalansteries, Castles and Urban Communes?” symposium for Superstudio, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), December 2021.
“Imagining the Post-Work City,” lecture presented with Andra Bria at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, February 2021
“Architecture and Communal Living in California, 1968-Present,” guest lecture at California College of the Arts, September 2019.
“Architectural Photography and Defamiliarization,” guest lecture at Solano Community College, September, 2019.
“Communal Life in the Bay Area,” talk given at Books, People, Places (architectural bookstore), Berlin, March 2018.
“The Experimental Aesthetics of Communes,” talk given in Pembroke Papers series, Pembroke College, Cambridge, October 2018.
“Communal Living in the Twenty-First Century,” talk given in Pembroke Papers series, Pembroke College, Cambridge, March 2018.
“Domestic Labor as Self-Valorization,” lecture at the Architectural Association PhD Seminar, London, November 2017.
“Deprofessionalizing Architecture,” Architecture Lobby panel discussion participant, California College of the Arts, August 2016.
“Communal Living in a City Not Designed For It: theories and strategies,” Domestic Affairs symposium, California College of the Arts, February 2016.
“Commoning and the Sharing Economy,” Left Forum 2015, New York City, May 2015.
“Disintegrative Urbanism(s): new economies and their urbanisms”—concluding lecture of the Immanent Urbanism(s) lecture series, the Red Victorian, May 2016.
“How Does Our Environment Police Our Sexualities?,” given at the Embassy SF, April 2016.
“Temporary Autonomous Zones: ephemeral moments of future societies?” panel participant and discussant in the Immanent Urbanism(s) lecture series. The Red Victorian, March 2016.
“The City as a Canvas for Art and Creative Interventions,” panel discussant in the Immanent Urbanism(s) lecture series. Dovetail, February 2016.
“What Would an Equitable Sexuality Look Like?,” given at the Embassy SF, August 2016.
“Hedonism, Freedom, Power: Are we really happy when we do what we want?,” given at the Embassy SF, November 2015.
“Progressive Cities: Planning, Reproduction and Power in the American Metropolis,” given at the Embassy, San Francisco, June 2015.
-Public Humanities Projects (hosted):
-Imagining the Post-Work City—Design competition and series of talks and discussions on post-industrious urbanism in the age of automation, co-hosted in collaboration with Andra Bria, August 2020-January 2021.
-Uprising! The Stonewall Riots at 50 (co-organizer), a series of talks, panels, and film screenings to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, as part of the 2019 Cambridge Festival of Ideas, October 2019.
-Domestic Affairs #4: Living Together—co-hosted in collaboration with the Urban Works Agency. Multi-panel symposium exploring the history, theory and practice of communal living, with one panel addressing each angle. Featuring notable scholars from a number of different universities: Emily Abruzzo (Yale), Zarinah Agnew (UCSF), Pier Vittorio Aureli (Yale), Neeraj Bhatia (CCA), Chris Carlsson (FoundSF), Irene Cheng (CCA), Keith Cooley (SF Community Land Trust), Andrew Herscher (University of Michigan), Jung In Kim (Soongsil University, Seoul), William Littman (CCA), Marc Norman (University of Michigan), Peretz Partensky (Langton Labs), Simon Sadler (UC Davis), Antje Steinmüller (CCA). Held at California College of the Arts, February, 2017.
-Domestic Affairs symposium—co-hosted in collaboration with the Urban Works Agency. Multi-panel symposium exploring communal housing as a site of possibility in addressing the housing crisis in San Francisco and beyond, and attended by design/planning professionals, students and academics from Yale and CCA. Concluding with a conversation between Pier Vittorio Aureli and Reinhold Martin. Held at California College of the Arts, February, 2016.
-Immanent Urbanism(s)—Founder, Curator and Host. 10-part lecture series about bottom-up urbanism and strategies for how to change existing cities, featuring prominent architectural/urban historians, designers, and counter-cultural icons. Spring 2015-summer 2016
-Critical Hedonism(s)—Founder, Curator and Host. Blog, lecture & discussion series dedicated to thinking through the possibilities and meaning of new economies of desire and care, mutual aid, the co-creation of knowledge, the re-coding of desires and pleasures, and the exploration of an ethics and strategy of critically-informed, mutual realization of desires. Summer 2016-present.
-Interviews:
“What is Fully-Automated Luxury Communism?” Upstream Podcast (alternative economics podcast) interview with Dr. Zarinah Agnew, May 2022.
“Designing Desire & the Post-Work City,” reroute.fm with Gavan Wilhite, podcast interview, May 2021.
“Revisiting the Major and the Minor: An Interview with Eric Wycoff Rogers,” interview with Joshua Tan, in Paprika! Folds, Vol. 1 (February 2021).
Working and Research Groups
Affect Theory and the History and Politics of Emotions Reading Group (for which I was the convener), University of Cambridge, 2020-2021
American History Seminar, University of Cambridge, 2018-2022
American History Workshop, University of Cambridge, 2018-2021
Gender and Sexuality History Workshop, University of Cambridge, 2017-2021
Intersections working group, co-organizer, 2018.
Creative Cities Working Group, Stanford University, 2016-2017
Queer Urbanisms Working Group, UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, 2017
Commune Research Commune, Embassy Network, 2016-2017
Critical Theory Seminar (convener), Embassy Network, 2016-2017
Affect Theory Working Group, University of Cambridge, 2017-2018
Teaching
University of Cambridge: supervisor for Historical Tripos Part I Paper 24 (The History of the United States from 1865) (supervised in the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 academic years) and Historical Tripos Part II Paper 26 (Consumption and Consumer Culture in the United States) (supervised in the 2020-2021 academic year).
Yale School of Architecture: I co-created and co-taught the Contemporary Architectural Discourse Colloquium—a graduate-level theory and history of architecture seminar—at the Yale School of Architecture, where my colleagues and I selected the topic of the course, developed the curriculum, selected and invited guest lecturers, and led the course, including facilitating discussions, grading student work, and teaching. Spring 2015.
Stanford University: guest lecturer in Andrew Herscher’s course How to be Governed Otherwise, 2017.
California College of the Arts: guest lecturer on communes and communal living for Neeraj Bhatia, 2016.
Minerva: guest lecturer on collective housing, 2017.
Critical Theory Seminar: I conducted regular instruction in a weekly seminar on critical and economic theory at the Red Victorian, 2016-2017.
California College of the Arts: regular guest critic in architecture studio, urban design and seminar courses. 2015-2017.
Collegiate Participation
Pembroke College Graduate Parlor Committee, Events Officer, 2017-2018.
Pembroke College Graduate Parlor Committee, Housing Officer, 2018-2019.
Pembroke College June Event Committee, Decor Officer, 2017-2018.
Pembroke College PemSalon salon discussions, founder and host, 2018-2019.
Cambridge Synthesizer Society (SynthSoc), founder, 2018-2019.