Sam Fox School Announces Four New Faculty Members

The Sam Fox School has appointed four new members to its faculty, Joe deVera, assistant professor of painting; Christopher Dingwall, assistant professor of design history; and Zahra Safaverdi, assistant professor of architecture, will join for the fall 2023 semester. Michelle L. Hauk, assistant professor of architecture, history, and theory, will join for the fall 2024 semester.

Carmon Colangelo, the Sam Fox School’s Ralph J. Nagel Dean, expressed his excitement on the new appointments. “I look forward to welcoming our new colleagues to St. Louis,” he said. “Their expertise will be a valued addition to the school and our students, and move us forward in key areas of our strategic plan.”

Joe deVera
Joe deVera’s paintings and installations are often attempts to clarify the absurd theaters of human tragedy (examining the possible relationships between historiography and art objects), while simultaneously investigating the resonant aftermath of mass conflict. Having emigrated from the Philippines as a youth and enlisting in the Marines Corps after high school — serving two combat deployments to Iraq in support of the Second Gulf War/GWOT — deVera’s works are also autobiographical observations of power structures and the machines of empire. He joins the Sam Fox School from Wake Forest University.

MFA in Painting and Printmaking, Yale University, 2014
BFA in Painting, California State University, Fullerton, 2011

Christopher Dingwall
Christopher Dingwall is a historian of American and African American culture, with interests in material culture, political economy, and race. He is currently working on two complementary research projects: Selling Slavery: Race and the Industry of American Culture (for the Slaveries Since Emancipation Series at Cambridge University Press), a history of commercial plantation iconography and the making of the American culture industry during the long wake of slave emancipation; and Black Designers in Chicago (for the University of Chicago Press), a chronicle of African American artists and craftspeople in the American design industry during the twentieth century. This project began as an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2018 and is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

PhD in History, University of Chicago, 2015 MA in Social Sciences, University of Chicago, 2006 BA in History and English, University of British Columbia, 2005

Michelle L. Hauk
Michelle L. Hauk returns to WashU where she earned her MArch and MSAS in 2015 and taught design studio and architectural history/theory for a year, including a seminar on women in architecture. She is currently a PhD candidate at Columbia University. Hauk’s research explores the social, cultural, and material history of domestic architecture in Japan through the lens of water and water-related technologies. Her research on water combines her interest in urban and architectural history with the histories of technology, the environment, and everyday life in Japan. Hauk will be a postdoctoral fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University during the 2023-24 academic year before joining the Sam Fox School in 2024.

MArch/MSAS, Washington University in St. Louis, 2015
BA in Studio Art and East Asian Studies, Kalamazoo College, 2007

Zahra Safaverdi
Zahra Safaverdi creates, curates, educates, and writes about architecture. Her disciplinary work explores methods of using architecture as a proxy for collective cultural memory, to bring different historical and geographical points to closer proximity and to material human forces often invisible. In her decade-long active involvement with architecture practice, she has worked with a wide range of clients from the intimate scale of single-family housing and fit-outs for nonprofit organizations, to the broader scale of institutional buildings and Google’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the recipient of the AIA design award, the ACSA Architecture Education award, Harvard GSD’s James Templeton Kelley thesis prize, Cal Poly’s thesis prize and president’s medal. She has been a Dean’s Merit Scholar at Harvard University, has held the Irving Innovation fellowship at Harvard GSD, the Schidlowski Emerging Faculty fellowship, the Art Omi: Architecture Residency, the MacDowell fellowship, and the Ragdale Foundation’s artist residency. She has given lectures and served as a critic at several institutions including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Cornell, and Rice. Her projects and design contributions have been exhibited globally in Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, Houston, Kent, Knoxville, Locarno, Los Angeles, London, Lubbock, Madrid, New York, San Luis Obispo, and Venice.

MArch, Harvard University
BArch, California Polytechnic State University