Dr Elizabeth Deans

Dr Elizabeth Deans is the Assistant Director of the Centre. Elizabeth is a historian specialising in architecture, drawings, and prints. She is especially interested in practices and processes found in book and object culture, administration, and sites of production, such as offices and building sites, from the late-sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries in Britain, France, and Early America. Her research explores the materiality of thinking and making in and about architectural space. Elizabeth has published on architectural drawings and the formation of practical knowledge in offices, on the building site, through travel networks and diplomatic channels. 

Elizabeth’s first monograph, Wren’s Architects: A Material History of Practice in England, c. 1660-1730 (forthcoming), examines the Office of the Works under the surveyorship of Sir Christopher Wren. The book highlights his two most highly trained pupils–Nicholas Hawksmoor and William Dickinson–and tells the story of how they rose through the ranks of the office from office clerks to architects. It is both a history of the practice in England and an intellectual history of architecture and state formation. Her future book projects include Nicholas Hawksmoor and the English Gothic Church and a volume on the educational capacity of the building site in seventeenth-century Europe.

Elizabeth has over a decade of experience in university teaching and supervision and has lectured for universities in the US, Europe, China, and Japan. Before her appointment, Elizabeth was Director of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor of Design History at George Washington University in partnership with the Smithsonian. She also taught at George Mason University and Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC and Capital University in Beijing (through Boston University). 

Elizabeth has held fellowships at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and the Smithsonian Institution, and her research has been funded by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB), the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (PMC), the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), The Bibliographical Society, The Georgian Group, the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, and other funding bodies.

Academic conference organisation

Vanbrugh: From Stage to Stone, 27 March 2026, Downing College, Cambridge (with The Georgian Group)

Building Sites in Early Modern Europe, 4-6 June 2026, Downing College, Cambridge