News

Erin Sassin

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Erin Sassin, assistant professor of history of art and architecture, has received a grant from the Graham Foundation to support publication expenses related to her book project titled, Single People and Mass Housing in Germany (1850–1930): (No) Home Away From Home.

Sassin’s book, which was the focus of her recent academic leave, will be the first complete study of single-person mass housing and the pivotal role this class- and gender-special building type played for over eighty years.

Such homes effectively bridged the public-private divide and rewrote the rules of who was deserving of quality housing—pointing forward to the building programs of Weimar Berlin and Red Vienna, experimental housing in Soviet Russia, feminist collectives, and accommodations for postwar “guestworkers,” as well as refugees, migrant workers, and the elderly today.

Sassin received her PhD in the History of Architecture from Brown University in 2012. She joined the faculty at Middlebury College the same year and has been teaching courses such as “Faust’s Metropolis” (art, architecture, and urbanism of Berlin), “Gender and the Making of Space,” “Bloom and Doom” (architecture and design in Vienna circa 1900—culminating in an exhibition at the Middlebury Museum of Art), “Architectural Utopias,” and a survey of Modern Architecture, among others.

Her research is closely linked to her teaching interests: she has published articles on the public/private world of middle class women in the German Empire and the intersection of architecture, power, and ethnicity in Upper Silesia. Her book, titled “Single People and Mass Housing in Germany and Beyond (1850-1930)—(No) Home Away from Home” is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic.