![](https://www.americanacademy.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Christensen.jpg)
Arthur Satz Professor of Humanities, University of Rochester
Berthold Leibinger Fellow - Class of Fall 2024
Peter Christensen is Arthur Satz Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester, where he also serves as associate dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and the Ani Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center. Christensen earned a BArch from Cornell University, an MA and M.DesS in the history and theory of architecture from Harvard University, as well as a PhD in architecture, also from Harvard. He has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century international architectural history and is the author of Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure (Yale, 2017), Precious Metal: German Steel, Modernity, and Ecology (Penn State, 2022), as well as Prior Art: Patents and the Nature of Invention in Architecture (MIT, 2024). Christensen’s work has received support from the John Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, among others. He has held previous positions at Cornell University, Technische Universität München, and Boston Architectural College.