Didem Ekici

Dr. Didem Ekici is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Trained as both an architect and a historian of the built environment, Dr. Ekici's research and teaching engage themes of health, housing, domestic interiors, materiality, and the Anthropocene across multiple scales—from decorative arts and architecture to urban design—spanning the period from the Enlightenment to the present. Ekici is the author of Surface, Textile, and German Material Culture: Bodies, Interiors, and Architecture, 1830-1914 (Bloomsbury, 2025) and the co-editor of Textile in Architecture: From the Middle Ages to Modernism (Routledge, 2023), Housing and the City (Routledge, 2022), and Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body (Routledge, 2017). She has held research fellowships from the Wellcome Trust, German Academic Exchange Service, University of Nottingham, University of Lincoln, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, and The University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities.