Thematic Conferences & Events

2025 | Past conferences

In addition to the biennial conference, the EAHN collaborates with institutions across the world to organize smaller, more focused themed conferences and seminars. These events are intended to raise the international profile of the Network through local collaborations and to promote inclusivity and interdisciplinarity.

Read our guidelines to hosting a Thematic Conference

2025

Microhistories of Architecture

Zürich, Switzerland

12-15 June 2025

#EAHNZurich

This EAHN Thematic Conference engages with the methodological tradition of Microhistory as a way to both interrogate our discipline’s capacity to rethink its own canons, and to question the historiographical challenges that come from applying the microhistorical method to architecture. At a time when architectural history joins the rest of the humanities in bringing to the fore marginalized, suppressed or minoritarian voices, such questions acquire new urgency.

The Built Ocean

Porto, Portugal

10–13 September 2025

#EAHNPorto

This themed conference aims to shift the focus of architectural history from the land to the sea. It will address the planet’s bodies of salt water either as areas of increasing urbanization, as connectors between space and cultures (navigation routes for people and resources, transported in the form of knowledge, labour, and materials), or as an ecosystem functioning, in connection with the land, as an essential life-support system (defining climatic patterns, providing resources from food to raw materials, and securing services from carbon sequestration to large-scale habitats).

Past Thematic conferences

Reykjavik 2023

The Third Ecology

Reykjavik, Iceland

11–13 October 2023

#EAHNReykjavik

The effects of the anthropogenic climate crisis has compelled a resurgence of scholarship about the often fraught relationship between the built and the natural environment. The conference will be chaired by MoMA’s Ambasz Institute and Listaháskóli Íslands (Iceland University of the Arts).

Helsinki 2023

States in Between

Helsinki, Finland

7–9 June 2023

#EAHNHelsinki

The ongoing war in Ukraine has made it clear that there is a need to re-evaluate and retune ourselves towards the practices of colonialism, empire-building, and centre-periphery relations, and to ask questions about national identity and built heritage in Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia, including the histories of Soviet and Russian architecture and the built environment at large.

Koya 2023

Heritage in Danger

Koya, Kurdistan Region, Iraq

20-21 February 2023

#EAHNKoya

While the world mourns the destruction of the widely known Iraqi archaeological and heritage sites of Nimrud, Hatra, Sinjar and the old town of Mosul caused by the ISIS invasion in 2014-2017, other Iraqi archaeological and heritage sites in much safer zones were and still are underestimated and exposed to silent death via ongoing neglect and unchecked deterioration with a very limited capacity to safeguard them like in the case of Koya’s old town which reached its zenith during the Ottoman reign.

Tirana 2021

History in Transition: Critical Interventions in Changing Environments

Tirana, Albania

8-10 July 2021

#EAHNTirana

Exploring heritage and preservation during periods of major transformations, Heritage in Transition is hosted by Polis University in Tirana, Albania.