
Sam Dodd
Assistant Professor
Areas of Specialization: Modern Art and Architecture in the United States, Material Culture, Histories of Media and Technology
PhD University of Texas at Austin
Email: Samuel.Dodd@stonybrook.edu
Office: Staller Center for the Arts #4215
Sam Dodd is a historian of American art and architecture. His research focuses primarily on the modern built environment, emphasizing the intersections between architecture and the visual arts, studies of material and popular culture, and the history of media as it relates to space and society.
Sam is currently completing his first monograph, All Eyes on Space: Television and the Architecture of Distant Sight, to be published with the University of Pittsburgh Press. The project considers how US broadcasting corporations employed spatial planning, environmental design, and property acquisition to build a privatized, commercial form of network television. It then showcases the work of designers and artists who challenged the rigidity of those built forms in pursuit of alternative media environments and experiences. It concludes by asking how contemporary global ecologies have been burdened by television’s spatializing logics.
Sam has published his work widely, including articles in Art Journal, Journal of Design History, Design Issues, and Journal of Architectural Education, along with essays for anthologies about critical heritage studies, the Arts and Crafts movement, and consumer culture. Moreover, he has received research funding from the Smithsonian Institution, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Humanities Institute at Pennsylvania State University.
Sam is a first-generation scholar-teacher. He received his PhD in Architectural History and Theory from the University of Texas at Austin and previously taught at the University of Arizona and Ohio University. At Stony Brook, he teaches courses on modern art and architecture, historical research methods, and socially engaged practices. He is an affiliate faculty member with the Media, Art, Culture, Technology Graduate Certificate as well as the Center for Changing Systems of Power.