Sun-Young Park

Sun-Young Park

Sun-Young Park

Associate Professor

European History: 19th-century Europe, modern France, architectural and urban history, history of medicine, cultural historiography and methods

Sun-Young Park is a cultural and architectural historian who specializes in nineteenth-century France. Her research focuses on the ways in which architectural history, urban history, and the history of medicine intersect. Her first book, Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), examines how a wide-ranging hygienic discourse shaped various institutions and public spaces of the early nineteenth-century capital, from military training grounds and schools to commercial pleasure gardens and community swimming pools. Professor Park is currently working on a second book project, The Architecture of Disability in Modern France, which will analyze how architectural and urban developments in France accommodated (and at times failed to accommodate) blind, deaf, and physically disabled subjects between 1750 and the early twentieth century. At Mason, she teaches courses on 19th-century Europe, French cultural history, history of medicine, and modern architectural and urban history. 

Professor Park received a B.A. from Princeton University, an M.Arch. from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Society of Architectural Historians, Mathy Junior Faculty Award in the Humanities (GMU), Whiting Foundation, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. 

Selected Publications

Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris, Culture, Politics, and the Built Environment Series (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).

  • Reviewed in American Historical Review, Architectural History, European History Quarterly, H-France Reviews, Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of Modern History, Journal of Social History, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Perspective: Actualité en histoire de l’art, Social History of Medicine, The Journal of Urbanism

“The Urban Gymnasia of Nineteenth-Century Paris, between Landscape and Architecture,” Landscapes for Sport: Histories of Physical Exercise, Sport, and Health, ed. Sonja Dümpelmann, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture series (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2022), 179-209.

“From Outcast to Citizen: Disability, Education, and Architecture in Postrevolutionary Paris,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 79, no. 2 (June 2020), 171-91.

“Conversion, Renovation, Restoration: The Paris Deaf Institute, 1760-1840,” Future Anterior 16, no.1: Disability and Preservation (Summer 2019), 69-84.

“Hygienic Promenades: The Montagnes Russes as Medical and Urban Artifacts,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 44:3 (Winter 2018): 29-49.

“Designing for Disability in 19th-Century Paris,” Log 42: Disorienting Phenomenology (Winter/Spring 2018): 80-90.

“Soldaten formen: Körperkultur im Paris des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Krieg in der industrialisierten Welt, ed. Thomas Kolnberger, Benoît Majerus, and M. Christian Ortner (Vienna: Caesarpress, 2017), 429-450.

Courses Taught

Graduate:

  • Gender, Sex, and the Modern City
  • The Modern Metropolis, 19th-20th Centuries
  • Modernity and Body Politics
  • History of Paris
  • Disease, Medicine, and Society
  • Themes in European History, 1815-present
  • Nineteenth-Century Europe

Undergraduate:

  • Nineteenth-Century Europe
  • History of Modern Architecture
  • Reading the Arts | Visualizing Modernity
  • Modern France
  • Modern Cities in Historical Perspective