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Anca Lasc

Associate Professor

Email
alasc@pratt.edu
Phone
718.636.3598
Website
https://sah.hcommons.org/members/alasc/

Trained as an art and design historian of nineteenth-century France, Dr. Lasc’s publications range from articles and chapters in peer-reviewed journals and volumes to books, including ‘Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media,’ co-edited with Georgina Downey and Mark Taylor (Bloomsbury, 2015); ‘Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail,’ co-edited with Patricia Lara-Betancourt and Margaret Maile Petty (Routledge, 2018); ‘Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse’ (Routledge, 2016); and her single-authored study ‘Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France: The Visual Culture of a New Profession’ (Manchester University Press, Studies in Design and Material Culture Series, 2018). This monograph examines how new forms of print media were used to ‘sell’ the idea of the unified interior as a total work of art, enabling the profession of interior designer to take shape. In observing the dependence of the trades on the artistic and public visual appeal of their work, the book establishes crucial links between the fields of art history, material and visual culture, and design history.
Anca’s current projects include ‘Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors,’ co-edited with Deborah Schneiderman, Keena Suh, Karin Tehve, Alexa Griffith Winton, and Karyn Zieve (Routledge, forthcoming 2020) and ‘Appropriated Interiors,’ co-edited with Deborah Schneiderman and Karin Tehve (Routledge, 2021), two volumes that she has developed with colleagues at Pratt Institute and which aim to bring together interior design history, theory and practice for the first time. More recently, ‘Revisiting the Past in Museums and at Historic Sites’ (Routledge, forthcoming 2021), co-edited with Andrew McClellan and Änne Söll, examines interventions into period rooms and historic house museums in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries – from Marxist augmented displays (marksistskaia dopolnitel’naia ekspozitsia) at Peterhof in the 1930s to the serial tv show ‘1900 House’ (aired in 1999-2000 on BBC Channel 4 in the United Kingdom and PBS in the US), from Simon Fujiwara’s appropriations of the Anne Frank House in Tel Aviv and Austria to Christmas Displays at Windsor Palace and Winston Churchill’s home.
Her essay titled ‘The Dry Goods Economist and the Role of Mass Media in the Creation of a Global Window Design Aesthetic at the End of the Nineteenth Century’ was published in ‘Design and Agency: Critical Perspectives on Identities, Histories,’ edited by John Potvin and Marie-Ève Marchand (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) earlier this year.
Dr. Lasc currently serves as the caa.reviews field editor for New York City exhibitions is a member of the CAA Committee on Design. Additionally, she serves as the secretary of the Society of Architectural Historians’ Historic Interiors Affiliate Group.

Ph.D. University of Southern California
B.A. Jacobs University Bremen, Germany