Deborah Lewittes’s field of specialization is modern European art and architecture, focusing on architecture, the visual arts, and town planning in England from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. Much of the progressive English architectural community that she studies grew around refugees and émigrés who were forced to flee Nazi Germany and ultimately settled in London. Her work thus incorporates theories of migration, exile, and diaspora as it analyzes the interaction of continental modernist ideals with English architectural and artistic thought. Dr. Lewittes’s book Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoint II and the Jewish Contribution to Modern English Architecture (Routledge, 2018) was shortlisted as a finalist in 2019 by the Historians of British Art for best new book on British Art, Architecture, and Visual Culture. Her second book, Shaping the City to Come: Rethinking Modern Architecture and Town Planning in England, c. 1934–1951 (Liverpool University Press, 2022) reveals this culture to be forward-looking and visionary, deviating from more standard narratives that saw it as reactionary.

Dr. Lewittes’s research has been supported by numerous grants from organizations such as the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation, the Historians of British Art, the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, and the Association of Art Historians-UK. She regularly presents her work at academic conferences, and her writing has also appeared in Humanities Bulletin, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Source: Notes in the History of Art, and other publications. At BCC, she teaches Introduction to the History of Art and History of Modern Art.

Education:

AB, Princeton University, Department of English

PhD, City University of New York Graduate School & University Center, Art History

Books:

Shaping the City to Come: Rethinking Modern Architecture and Town Planning in England, c. 1934–1951. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022.

Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoint II and the Jewish Contribution to Modern English Architecture. London and New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2018.

Articles:

“Being Within: Ernö Goldfinger, forties architecture, and Jewish London,” special art issue of AJS Perspectives (Fall 2021), 64–6.

“Spiraling out of Control: Modern Architecture, the Emigration Decade, and the Filming of Lubetkin’s Penguin Pool.” Humanities Bulletin (vol. 2, number 2: November 2019), 236–255.

“A Clean Sweep? Contemplating the Ruins of Postwar London.” Source: Notes in the History of Art, Journal of the Bard Graduate Center published by University of Chicago Press (vol. 37, number 4: 2018), 246–60.