Sheila Crane Receives Graham Foundation Grant for Book on the History of the Bidonville

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Architectural historian Sheila Crane has been awarded a $10,000 grant from the Graham Foundation in support of her forthcoming book, The City in the Shadow of the Shantytown: A Critical History of the Bidonville. The book will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press as part of its Culture, Politics, and the Built Environment series.

Crane’s study offers a critical history of the bidonville—the Francophone equivalent of the shantytown—tracing its emergence in early 20th-century Casablanca under French colonial rule and its enduring spatial, political, and cultural significance across North Africa. The book challenges dominant narratives that cast the bidonville as marginal and unauthorized, instead revealing it as a product of colonial urban strategies and a site of anticolonial resistance, spatial reinvention, and everyday inhabitation.

The Graham Foundation’s 2025 grant cycle awarded $385,500 to 42 individuals whose work spans exhibitions, publications, research, films, and digital initiatives that advance interdisciplinary ideas in architecture and design. Chosen from nearly 600 proposals submitted from around the world, this year’s grantees include emerging and established scholars, artists, architects, designers, and curators. Crane’s award follows her recent recognition as the recipient of the 2025 David R. Coffin Publication Grant from UVA’s Center for Cultural Landscapes.

Sheila Crane, chair and associate professor of architectural history at UVA School of Architecture, is the author of Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture (University of Minnesota Press), which received the 2013 Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her research focuses on the spatial legacies of imperialism, colonialism, migration, and resistance in the built environment, with a particular emphasis on North Africa and the Mediterranean.