Valentina Rozas-Krause

Valentina Rozas-Krause received her Ph.D. in Architecture (History, Theory & Society) from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an architect with a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her field of study encompasses architecture, urbanism, and landscape from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular research and teaching interests in memory, postcolonialism, preservation, public space, social justice, and gender. Valentina has published two books. The first, Ni Tan Elefante, Ni Tan Blanco (Ril, 2014), is an urban, architectural, and political history of the National Stadium in Chile. The second is the co-edited volume Disputar la Ciudad (Bifurcaciones, 2018) which deals with spatial strategies of oppression, resistance, memory and reparation within varying urban contexts. These join peer-reviewed articles in History & Memory, Latin American Perspectives, Anos 90, ARQ, Revista 180, Cuadernos de Antropología Social, and Bifurcaciones alongside a chapter in the edited volume Neocolonialism and Built Heritage (Routledge, 2020). Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Townsend Center for the Humanities Dissertation Fellowship, a John L. Simpson Research Fellowship in International and Comparative Studies from UC Berkeley, a DAAD Dissertation Research Grant, and a Becas Chile Grant.

Valentina Rozas-Krause is currently working on a book project titled Memorials and the Cult of Apology, which examines how contemporary memorials have come to embody more than memory. It begins with a simple observation of the growing demand for apologies across the globe and the related proliferation of memorials that aim to atone for past injustices. In effect, apologies are being materialized into memorials, a phenomenon of global importance, which presents a major shift in national self-representation. As the first scholarly work to address memorials as apologies, her research builds an empirical and theoretical understanding of multiple aspects of apology and memorialization, of their material forms, the actors involved, and the diverse effects built apologies produce. It uses five representative case studies located in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and San Francisco, to develop this argument. Since memorialization is an inherently interdisciplinary topic, her work incorporates methods, readings, and theories from a vast array of humanistic disciplines, particularly postcolonial theory, Holocaust and human rights scholarship, and debates about justice, recognition, reparation, and morality.

She is currently working on a edited volume about monuments and gender tentatively entitled "Breaking the Bronze Ceiling."