Historian to present lecture on modern architecture in America, Japan

Gregory Clancey, an associate professor of history at the National University of Singapore, will speak about the rise of modern architecture in the early-to-mid-20th century in the United States and Japan.

Clancey, who was born and raised in Bangor, Maine, will present “How Architects Became Modern in America and Japan,” at 11 a.m. Tuesday, May 24 in Colvin Hall, Room 107.

The lecture is co-sponsored by the Honors College and the University of Maine Humanities Center.

In addition to being a stunning aesthetic development, the rise of modern architecture was an important social, political and cultural phenomenon which historians have yet to fully explore, according to Clancey.

Through his research for a current book project, Clancey hopes to better understand what modernism in the United States and Japan intended, what it achieved, and how and why its ambitions reached a limit.

At the National University of Singapore, Clancey also leads the Asia Research Institute’s Science, Technology and Society Cluster. He received a Ph.D. in the historical and social study of science and technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo, Nagasaki University and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

His book “Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–1930,” won the Sidney Edelstein Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. Clancey also is the 2012 recipient of the Morison Prize from MIT.