Ana Ozaki

Ana Ozaki is Mellon Race, Place, and Equity Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Architectural History, School of Architecture. Ozaki's research investigates the complex ways racial ideologies have interfered with architectural understandings of climate and the environment within the African diaspora, mainly within the Black Atlantic. Centered on Brazil's construction of an architectural ideal for the rest of the tropics, her dissertation, "The Brazilian Atlantic: New 'Brazils,' Plantation Architecture, Race, and Climate in Brazil and Africa, 1910-1974," examined the country's connections to West and Southern Africa, specifically Nigeria, Angola, and Mozambique, albeit often mediated by Europe. Through Black feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial theories, her research elucidates how the history of modernism and modernist architecture in the tropics has been entangled with racial capitalism. She argues that such narratives are central to local and localized Black experiences and negotiations brought into relation by colonialism and cannot be understood without cross-cultural and South-to-South exchanges between tropicalized sites, subjects, and practices.