Cameron Macdonell

Cameron Macdonell is a historian of art, architecture, and interior design. He focuses on the construction of meaning through iconographical, phenomenological, and psychological approaches to interiority, especially the narratology of textual environments and the ritualization of built environments. His first book, Ghost Storeys (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), unfolds a narrative of physiological and psychological trauma in the highly ritualized spaces of a Gothic Revival church, contextualizing the architect’s Gothic literature to present revivalist architecture as the phantom limb pain of an irrecuperable past. Cameron’s current book project, “Haunts: Citing/Siting/Sighting the Ghost in British and American Architecture, ca. 1750 and Beyond,” traces the ghost as a metaphysical and metaphorical figure (of speech) haunting the autobiographical interiors of houses architects design for themselves. And his next major research project explores the afterlives of artifacts (from discrete objets d’art to reclaimed materials) within the interior designs of Canadian houses.

Cameron received an honours BA in art history from the University of Windsor, winning the Board of Governors Medal for the School of Visual Arts. He received an MA in Canadian art history from York University, where his SSHRC-funded research earned him a nomination for the Governor General’s Gold Medal. He received his PhD in the history and theory of architecture at McGill University, where his SSHRC-funded dissertation was awarded the King Student Medal from the ARCC. He has also worked as a postdoctoral assistant at ETH Zürich, as a research associate with McGill University’s school of architecture, and as a copyeditor for book and journal projects, including several issues of the Journal of Architectural Education.