Shelley Hornstein

Shelley Hornstein is Senior Scholar and Professor Emerita of Architectural History & Urban Culture at York University. 

She explores a wide-ranging set of themes located at the intersection of memory and place in architectural sites and cultural heritage. In particular, her research focuses on Jewish museums, memorials, and touristic sites. Her latest book, Architectural Tourism: Site-Seeing, Itineraries and Cultural Heritage (Lund Humphries, 2021), investigates the role of architecture as central to tourism at virtual and material sites. Other books include Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place (Ashgate/Routledge, 2011), and co-edited books: Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art (McGill-University Press, 2000), Image and Remembrance: Representation and The Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2002), and Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust (NYU Press, 2003). She is published widely in edited volumes, scholarly journals, and catalogues.  The recipient of various international awards, fellowships, and guest professorships, she also serves on advisory boards for several academic journals. 

A graduate of the Université de Strasbourg (Marc Bloch), France, Professor Hornstein has taught at York University since 1985. Her courses include Memory and Place, Cultural Cartographies, Paris as Modernist Dream, The Celluloid City, No Place like Home, and The Metropolis Revisited. Prior to York University, she taught at Concordia and Laval Universities. As Senior Scholar, she is a member of York’s graduate programs in Art History, Culture and Communications, and Social and Political Thought. She has served as Associate Dean, Co-Director of the Centre for Feminist Research, and twice Chair of Department of Fine Arts, Atkinson College. Currently, she is an ISGAP Research Fellow (The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy) and Consultant with AEPJ (European Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Jewish Culture and Heritage.