&Lab

María González Pendás is an Assistant Professor in the History of Architecture and Urban Development Program at AAP. Her historical research explores the role architecture has played in anti-democratization processes during the 20th century, specifically within histories of fascism in Spain and of modernity/coloniality in the Spanish transatlantic world. In turn, with her involvement in the Public Humanities, González Pendás looks to facilitate projects and strategies for civic empowerment through design and scholarly work. She is a founding co-chair of the University Seminar Workshop on Public Humanities at Columbia University, where faculty, artists and curators from various institutions share civically-engaged curricular approaches to graduate education, and was the Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the SoF/Heyman Center for the Humanities between 2019-21. At Columbia, she built-up the Humanities in Practice Initiative to offer fellowships, events, and courses that help humanists experiment with new modes of engaged scholarship. Among other projects, she led the graduate student series Building Publics, awarded with the 2021 Addressing Racism Seed Grant from the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement of Columbia University, and has served on Public Humanities Fellowship Committees at the SoF/Heyman, The Stavros-Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative, and Humanities New York.