Samuel Dubois
Samuel Dubois is an architect (registered with the Ordre des architectes du Québec), environmental historian, editor, and trained geographer. Born in Thetford Mines—once known as the “Asbestos Capital of the World”—in the Canadian Appalachians, he holds a B.A. in Geography from McGill University, a B.Sc. in Architecture from the Université de Montréal, an M.Arch. (with thesis) from Carleton University, and a Ph.D. in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture from MIT. Samuel has several years of professional experience with award-winning architecture firms in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Canada. His academic work broadly interrogates the entanglements between the built environment, land, resource extraction, and cultural identities, with a particular focus on historically marginalized communities in Canada and across the former British Empire.
His doctoral dissertation, Arctic Modernities: Architecture and Transcultural Heritage in Inuit Nunangat (Arctic Canada), ca. 1851–1960, examines how interactions between Inuit communities and Western whalers and fur traders transformed the Arctic built environment and gave rise to distinctive forms of architectural modernity. More specifically, it analyzes the transcultural heritage that emerged from these encounters through interdisciplinary and decolonial methods, notably by foregrounding Inuit voices and Indigenous perspectives and by critically engaging with previously unpublished oral histories and archival photographs from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Samuel’s doctoral research has been approved by the Board of Trustees of the Inuit Heritage Trust and has served as the basis for conference presentations at leading institutions worldwide, including the University of Cambridge (2021), the University of Oxford (2023), the MIT Museum (2024), Georgia Institute of Technology (2024), the New York Public Library (2024), Carleton University (2025), the University of Porto (2025), the University of Helsinki (2025), and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2026).
His writing, in both English and French, has appeared in peer-reviewed publications such as Divergence in Architectural Research and the Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada; in thematic online issues published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Canada Research Chair in Architecture, Competitions and Quality; and in the edited volume Ambition, Utopia and Hubris: Classicism in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2026). Samuel is also the co-editor of MIT’s peer-reviewed journal of art and architecture, Thresholds 52: Disappearance (MIT Press, 2024), which received the Douglas Haskell Award for Student Journals (2024) from AIA New York | Center for Architecture and was recognized by the American Institute of Graphic Arts as a winner of the 50 Books | 50 Covers competition (2025).
Samuel is the recipient of multiple fellowships, awards, and distinctions, including the MIT Presidential Fellowship, the Joseph-Armand-Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, the Martin Eli Weil Prize (awarded for the best essay in architectural history in Canada), the Prix de la Fondation Habitat 67 (awarded for excellence in housing design), and the Excellence Award in Steel Design from the Canadian Institute of Steel Construction. He notably received the First Prize and the People’s Choice Award at Carleton University’s Three Minute Thesis competition in 2017, and his graduate work has since been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (for both his M.Arch. and Ph.D.), the MIT Department of Architecture, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the MIT Office of Graduate Education, and the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives.
