Phoebe Springstubb

Phoebe Springstubb is an architectural historian whose research focuses on the Circumpolar North, the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands, and hemispheric connections between eastern Siberia and Arctic North America. Her dissertation, “The Inhabited Arctic: Architecture, Time, and the Making of the Past in the Bering Strait,” examines the role of time and its material mediations as a dimension of the region’s political, cultural, and ecological transformations over two centuries.

Her research has been supported, most recently, by a Getty Research Institute predoctoral fellowship (2024–2025) and a Dumbarton Oaks junior fellowship in Garden and Landscape Studies (2023–2024). Before beginning her PhD at MIT, she was a curatorial assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, where she co-organized a wide range of exhibitions and their related catalogues. She is an incoming postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows and assistant professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan.

Publications
Animal Passages
In Figuring Territory, web issue of the Canadian Centre for Architecture
2023
“They builde with whale bones”: Living Building Practices, Extinct Economies, and Conflicts of Time in the 19th-Century Bering Strait
Research at the Getty Research Institute, 2024–2025
Counter-Tempos: Art, Geomyths, and the Mammoth in 19th-Century Alaska
The Geological Imagination in the Long Nineteenth Century, conference at The Huntington Library
2025
A Landscape "Difficult to Describe": The Model Village and the Capital City
In “Cosmopolitanism’s Others: Forgotten Histories of Transnational Architectural Practice,” ed. Jiat-Hwee Chang and Eunice Seng, special issue, Architectural Theory Review
2023
Étienne-Louis Boullée, Cenotaph to Newton
In Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Edouard Kopp, Elizabeth M Rudy and Kristel Smentek
2023

Contact

psprings@mit.edu