Andrew Herscher

A trained architect and historian of architecture, Andrew Herscher is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Herscher works on the spatial politics of violence, humanitarian and human rights issues, exile and migration, and contemporary art and architecture. His research, writing, and teaching is informed by his long-term participant observation in Kosovo’s post-conflict environment, including work with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, and the Kosovo Cultural Heritage Project, a nongovernmental organization he co-founded and co-directed. During his time at Michigan, Herscher has been involved in a number of collaborative projects in Detroit, including the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective; Detroit Resists, a coalition of activists, artists, architects, and community members working on behalf of an inclusive, equitable, and democratic city; and the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency, an open-access platform for the study of urban crisis using Detroit as a focal point.

Among Herscher’s publications are Displacements: Architecture and Refugee (Sternberg Press, 2017); Spatial Violence, co-edited with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi (Routledge Press, 2016); The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2012); and Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2010).

Herscher holds joint appointments as an associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures and associate professor of history of art in U-M’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. From 2017 to 2018, he was a visiting associate professor in the Urban Studies Program at Stanford University.

Herscher has a PhD in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning from Harvard University, a Master of Architecture from Harvard University, and a Bachelor of Arts in architecture from Yale University.