Tom Joashi

Tom is a visiting doctoral student in Architecture from the University of Cambridge, where he is supervised by Max Sternberg and Tim Chesters. He holds a BA in French and German and an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies, both also from Cambridge. For the 2024/2025 academic year, he is a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Tom’s work centres on perceptions of urban space at the time of the early French Wars of Religion (approx. 1560-1575), when conflicts between Catholics and Protestants were at their bloodiest and most frequent. He is interested in notions of the ideal city during the European Renaissance and, as termed by André Chastel, its ‘crisis’ in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Specifically, he is attempting to locate jubilant receptions of the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre among radical Catholics within the period’s culture of urban festival, looking to the ways in which cities could become imagined spaces of wonder through ephemeral architectural interventions and the collective mobilisation of inhabitants. Were massacres ever conceptualised similarly? Broadly speaking, he enjoys exploring both theoretical approaches to the past and historical approaches to theory; his project is inspired by the violence that perceivably underlies modern urbanism.