Esra Akcan is a Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Architecture, and a board member at the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. She completed her architecture degree at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and her Ph.D. and postdoctoral degrees at Columbia University in New York. She taught at UI-Chicago, Humboldt University in Berlin, Columbia University, New School, and Pratt Institute in New York, and METU in Ankara. 

Akcan’s research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism foregrounds the intertwined histories of Europe, West Asia and Northeast Africa, and offers new ways to understand architecture’s role in global, social and environmental justice. Her book Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (Duke University Press, 2012) offers a new way to understand the global movement of architecture that extends the notion of translation beyond language to visual fields. It advocates a commitment to a new culture of translatability from below and in multiple directions for cosmopolitan ethics, global justice and perpetual peace. Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion/Chicago University Press, 2012, with Sibel Bozdoğan) is part of a series that aims at an inclusive survey of modern world architecture and is the first volume in any language to cover the entire 20th century in Turkey. Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA-1984/87 (Birkhäuser/De Gruyter University Press, 2018) defines open architecture as the translation of a new ethic of hospitality into design process. It exemplifies formal, programmatic and procedural steps towards open architecture during the urban renewal of Berlin’s immigrant neighborhood, by giving voice not only to the established and understudied architects who were invited to build public housing here, but also to noncitizen residents. Her book Abolish Human Bans: Intertwined Histories of Architecture (CCA, 2022) builds on her theory of architectural translation to construct an activist gesture against the racist anti-immigration policies of ruling powers. She has edited Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination (with Iftikhar Dadi, Routledge, 2023). Her book Architecture and the Right-to-Heal: Resettler Nationalism in the Aftermath of Conflict and Disaster (Duke University Press, 2025) explores architecture’s role in healing societies after conflicts and disasters by discussing buildings and spaces in relation to transitional justice and energy transition. Currently, she is writing A History of the World by Modern Architecture.

Akcan has won numerous awards, and authored more than two-hundred articles and essays in scholarly books and professional journals of multiple languages on critical and postcolonial theory, geopolitical inequalities and peacebuilding, immigration, welcoming and cosmopolitan ethics, human and more-than human rights, critique of climate change and mass extinction, racism and reparations, translation, and global history. She has participated in exhibitions by carrying her practice beyond writing to visual media, and has taken leadership positions including the IES Director at the Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University, as well as the Director of Graduate Studies at Cornell University and UIC. As a director at the Einaudi Center, and member of the Academy in Exile in Germany, she participated in finding academic homes for scholars at risk. She has advised about 40 doctoral students (15 as primary advisor) in Architecture History, Art History, and related programs.