Emine Seda Kayim, Ph.D.

Visiting Assistant Professor

Emine Seda Kayim is an architect, historian, and documentary filmmaker. As a scholar of the built environment, her expertise spans German studies, media theory, surveillance studies, and science and technology studies. Working within this framework, Seda’s research explores spatial practices of surveillance, policing, and incarceration under totalitarian and democratic regimes, currently with a focus on socialist and post-socialist built environments.

Seda’s current book project, Surveillance versus Scientific Management: The Stasi and the East German Built Environment 1961-1989, uncovers the largely overlooked built environmental 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’s writings have appeared in PLATFORM, Journal of Urban Affairs, and react/review, 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 Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey.