Giulia Amoresano

EDUCATION
Ph.D. in Architecture, University of California Los Angeles (ABD Fall 2025)
Master of Science in Architecture, Building and Planning (Architectural Urban Design and Engineering track), University of Technology Eindhoven
Bachelor of Science in Interior Architecture and Exhibition Design, University of Rome “La Sapienza”

Giulia Amoresano is an Assistant Professor of Architecture in the Auburn University School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture where she teaches architectural history courses and design studios. Amoresano researches and teaches architectural modernism focusing on transnational networks of commodities exchanges, migratory flows and agrarian modernization practices across different scales in the 19th and 20th century. Her dissertation, “Cultivating the Italian Empire: Architecture and the Origins of the Global South (1861–1914),” is a transnational history of architectural modernism in the newly established nation-state of Italy. It traces how the environmental and architectural technologies imported from the U.S. and implemented to increase Italian agrarian productivity morphed into internal and external colonization campaigns. Cultivating the Italian Empire shows how land reclamations, settlement schemes, farmhouses, agricultural colonies and dams shaped and extended from the malaria-infested land of Southern Italy to the highlands of the Italian colony of Eritrea, and to diasporic communities of Italian farmers in the Americas. It shows how these environmental campaigns meant to build the nation facilitated conceptions of Southerness transnationally, influencing modernist aesthetics and mapping the emergence of a global discourse of ‘development’ that links Southern Italy to the U.S. South and the establishment of international governance institutions in the early twentieth century.

Amoresano continues to explore intersections of large-scale infrastructural works (especially meant to increase mining and electricity production), transnational discourses of Southerners’ modernization and processes of nation-state building through new work that looks at the use of Italy’s South as a ground for international capital investment (1920s) and as a model for developmentalism (1950s). In addition, Amoresano researches and teaches about architectural pedagogy and the role of architectural curricula and programs in the making of the built environment. She has published and presented her work internationally, and her research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for European and Russian Studies, the UCLA School of Art and Architecture and the Society of Architectural Historians.

Before joining the faculty at Auburn, Amoresano taught at the University of Southern California, the Southern California Institute of Architecture and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and practiced in Architecture and Urban Design in Italy, The Netherlands, Brazil and India working in private and public sectors.