About
Valentina Rozas-Krause is a postdoctoral LSA Collegiate Fellow in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan. She is both a professional architect and a historian of the built environment with a focus on global cultural practices across the Americas and Europe. Valentina holds a Ph.D. in Architectural History from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master's Degree in Urban Planning, and a B.Arch, both from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her field of study encompasses architecture, urbanism, and landscape from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular research and teaching interests in memory, postcolonialism, preservation, public space, social justice, and gender.
Current Work
Valentina Rozas-Krause is currently working on a book project titled Memorials and the Cult of Apology, which examines how contemporary memorials have come to embody more than memory. It begins with a simple observation of the growing demand for apologies across the globe and the related proliferation of memorials that aim to atone for past injustices. In effect, apologies are being materialized into memorials, a phenomenon of global importance, which presents a major shift in national self-representation. As the first scholarly work to address memorials as apologies, her research builds an empirical and theoretical understanding of multiple aspects of apology and memorialization, of their material forms, the actors involved, and the diverse effects built apologies produce. It uses five representative case studies located in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and San Francisco, to develop this argument. Since memorialization is an inherently interdisciplinary topic, her work incorporates methods, r