Emine Seda Kayim, Ph.D.

Visiting Assistant Professor

Emine Seda Kayim is an architect, historian, and documentary filmmaker. She specializes in industrialization, mass production, and political economy of architecture from the 20th century to the present. Her expertise spans media theory, German studies, and architectural history, with a focus on postwar Central and Eastern Europe. Seda’s current research explores surveillance, policing, and incarceration in the Soviet-socialist and contemporary German built environment.

Seda’s book project, The Stasi as an Architectural Producer: Surveillance versus Scientific Management in the East German Built Environment 1961-1989, uncovers the largely overlooked architectural history of the German Democratic Republic’s Ministry of State Security. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, among others. Seda published in react/review, Arredamento Mimarl?k, and Mimarist, and her documentary film work has been exhibited at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, Istanbul Design Biennale, Prague Architecture Week, and DocumentarIST.

Before joining the University of Kentucky, Seda taught at the University of Michigan where she received her Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture. An Istanbul native, she holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture and a Master’s degree in the History and Theory of Architecture from the Y?ld?z Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey.