Stokes-Rees, Emily
Stokes-Rees, Emily
Bio Sketch
Emily W. Stokes-Rees (D.Phil, Oxford, 2007 — material anthropology and museum ethnography) is Director of the School of Design and Iris Magidson Endowed Professor of Design Leadership (Professor of Museum Studies) at Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts. A museum professional with over twenty years of experience ranging from exhibition development and interpretation to education, and previously holding positions at Harvard University and Brown University, she researches museums, heritage, tourism and the cultural politics of identity — with sustained attention to museums in Asia as sites of postcolonial nation building. Her chapter on the Museum of Macau (fieldwork conducted shortly after the museum's 1998 opening, with interviews of museum staff and government representatives and direct observation of visitors) brings this museum-studies perspective into The Interior Architecture Theory Reader as the volume's case for spatial configuration as an active agent in constituting knowledge and identity.
Key Works
- *Symbiotic spaces: Decolonizing identity in the spatial design of the Museum of Macau* (2018) — Chapter 6 of The Interior Architecture Theory Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic): the Museum of Macau as a symbiosis of building, nation, museum and narrative, and the spatial construction of postcolonial identity.
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Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- narrative-space — the museum building as both storyteller and part of the story
- exhibitionary-complex — directed routes, organized walking, and the museum's social authority
- symbiotic-spaces — the chapter's master concept: mutual relationship of museum, nation, building, and narrative
- postcolonial-identity — identity constructed through spatial design in formerly colonized states
- adaptive-reuse — the colonial fortress reappropriated as national museum
Relevance to the Core Research
Stokes-Rees supplies the wiki's interior cluster with its institutional, public-scale case: where Hollis theorizes alteration and Qureshi therapizes it, she shows an altered colonial fortress actively producing a national identity — interior architecture as "an active agent in constituting knowledge and experience." Her account extends the wiki's power-and-space debate into the museum (Bennett's exhibitionary complex via exhibitionary-complex), gives narrative-space its founding formulation, and connects the postcolonial register (postcolonial-identity) to the everyday/iconic debate: her "places of iconicity" on Macau's high point link museum symbolism to the wiki's iconic-architecture cluster, while her Rose-inspired attention to visitors' wayward practices (hide-and-seek in the galleries) keeps the everyday's refusal of designed meaning in view.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
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