Jay Cephas is an historian of architecture, landscapes, and cities whose research investigates the relationships between technology, subjectivity, and spatial practices. Jay analyzes both ordinary and critical spatial practices to recover the latent and as of yet invisible knowledges that are transmitted through the bodies and buildings of urban environments. In Fordism and the City, Jay deploys these frameworks to examine the agonism structuring Fordism and urbanization in early twentieth-century Detroit. A newer research project turns to New York City to address the knowledge transfer occurring between visionary architects and labor activists in their efforts to create cooperative housing.
Jay was recently awarded a Graham Foundation Grant for the Black Architects Archive, an interactive repository of under-represented architects across 200 years of history that will serve as a new tool for conducting computational analysis in architectural history while also working to diversify the curriculum in architectural education.
Jay’s recent publications include "Picturing Modernity: Race, Labor, and Landscape in the American South," which traces the ways in which black labor served to reinforce racialized landscape production in Georgia; “Agricultural Urbanism in Detroit,” which examines the changing meaning of urbanism in the after-city; and “Citing Sites,” an essay exploring the parallel construction of the biographical narrative and the life histories of cities. Jay’s urban design work built upon these themes by integrating scholarship and practice to produce innovative and lively urban spaces, such as the St. Joseph Rebuild Center, a disaster recovery center in New Orleans that was awarded a 2009 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence and the 2009 NCARB Prize for the Creative Integration of Practice and Education.
Jay is the founding director of Studio Plat, a Boston-based geospatial research and development practice that examines the past, present, and future of cities. Using qualitative and human-centered research methods, Studio Plat develops products and systems to maximize social impact design and planning while helping mission-driven organizations build greater capacity through their work in community engagement, social justice, and equitable design. Studio Plat serves these organizations by designing participatory planning and community engagement processes, conducting organizational assessments, developing strategic plans, and interpreting urban research through data analysis and visualization; Studio Plat directly serves the larger urban community by performing neighborhood assessments, advising community organizations on issues such as gentrification and redevelopment, and making urban research data publicly accessible. As such, Studio Plat aims to help make social impact urbanism a normative component of urban development.
Jay is currently an Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. He previously taught at Harvard University, University of Michigan, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Northeastern University, and University of Detroit Mercy. Jay holds a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism from Harvard University and an M.Arch. from the University of Detroit Mercy. Additionally, he was a 2019 W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Architectural Education, as the Editorial Director for Positions: On Modern Architecture + Urbanism / Histories + Theories, the Editor-in-Chief of Crit, and was a Design + Research Fellow at the Detroit Collaborative Design Center, where he managed building projects for low-income communities.
Jay is co-editor, with Igor Marjanovic and Ana Miljacki, of an upcoming issue of the Journal of Architectural Education, themed “Pedagogies for a Broken World.”