Dr Elizabeth Deans

Elizabeth is a historian of seventeenth-century European architecture and a scholar of Christopher Wren.  Elizabeth’s research explores the history of architecture as a practical, intellectual, and materially iterative process, with particular attention to how architectural skills and expertise were formed, communicated, and transformed through social and material acts. Elizabeth is interested in early modern sites of architectural production––including offices, workshops, and building sites––spaces in and through which architecture was conceived, negotiated, and realised.

These methods underpin her first book, Wren’s Architects (forthcoming), which recovers the practices of the English Office of Works as an institutional environment in which expertise was cultivated not only through drawing but also through daily administrative routines, official duties, and collective labour within a collaborative milieu.

Her recent turn to exploring the intellectual realm of architectural transformation has emphasised an epistemic potential of seventeenth-century building sites. Architecture in an unfinished state functioned as a permeable and liminal mechanism of inquiry where observation and expertise converged to test and generate new kinds of knowledge. These themes are being developed in the edited volume Architecture in Rising (Lund Humphries, forthcoming), co-edited with Dr Alexandre Cojannot (French Ministry of Culture) and Dr Étienne Faisant (Musée du Grand Siècle, Sorbonne Univerisité). Focusing on Paris and the Île-de-France between c. 1590 and 1690, the volume examines building sites as dynamic arenas of social, technological, administrative, and material exchange, offering a new perspective on the transformation of architecture in early modern Europe. 

Elizabeth is embarking on a new collaborative research project called Architectural Intelligence, which incorporates her second book project (co-authored) titled 1665 Architecture Between Nations, a dual-perspective history of the first international congress of architecture in Paris in the summer of 1665.

Elizabeth serves as a building historian across England and is an elected fabric advisor to the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral, London.

Elizabeth supervises doctoral students who explore histories of architecture, drawing, prints, and ideas of Europe and early America, c. 1600-1700.

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