Albena Yaneva

Professor Architectural Theory, University of Manchester
Albena Yaneva is Professor of Architectural Theory and Director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARG) at the Manchester Urban Institute. She holds a DEA from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and a PhD from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (2001). She has been Visiting Professor at Princeton School of Architecture (2013), Parsons, New School (2015) and Politecnico di Turino (2018). She held the prestigious Lise Meitner Visiting Chair in Architecture at the University of Lund, Sweden (2017-2019).

Her research is intrinsically transdisciplinary and crosses the boundaries of science studies, cognitive anthropology, architectural theory and political philosophy. She is the author of seven monographs: The Making of a Building (Peter Lang 2009), Made by the OMA: An Ethnography of Design (010 Publishers 2009), Mapping Controversies in Architecture (Routledge 2012), Five Ways to Make Architecture Political. An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice (Bloomsbury 2017), Crafting History: Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy (Cornell University Press 2020), Latour for Architects (Routledge 2022), Architecture After Covid (Bloomsbury 2023). She co-authored The New Architecture of Science: Learning from Graphene (World Scientific Publishing 2020) with the Nobel Laureate in Physics Sir Kostya S. Novoselov. She is also the editor of What is Cosmopolitical Design? (Routledge 2015, with Alejandro Zaera-Polo).

Her work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Thai, Polish, Turkish and Japanese. Yaneva has delivered more than 147 invited lectures at prestigious universities including in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Irland, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malaysa, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the USA. 42 of these were keynote addresses at major conferences. She is the recipient of the RIBA President’s award for outstanding university-based research (2010).

She is also the recipient of academic grants of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago (2003), the British Academy (2008), the EU (2008-2010), the Swedish Research Council (2019-2021) and the ESRC (2021-2022). She was a member of the Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economy and Society Research Council in the UK and serves as a reviewer for the National Science Foundations of USA, Switzerland, Austria, Irland and the Netherlands. Yaneva was a judge for the 2017 RIBA President's Medals in the Silver Medal category, RIBA London and a panel member (output assessor) for REF2021 - sub-panels C13 and D32.