About ISIE
The ISIE is a global interdisciplinary network of researchers interested in the design, promotion, reception, and consequence of the world’s fairs and expositions held since 1851. Though rooted in the history of architecture, science, diplomacy, art, and technology, our members hail from many disciplines and we welcome the participation of all those interested in exploring the many intersecting aspects of international expositions.
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Overture to an Alliance: British Propaganda at the New York World's Fair, 1939-1940
by Nicholas Cull, Professor and Global Communication Policy Fellow at University of Southern California's Annenberg's Center
November 20, 2025 at 1 PM EST
This event is free, open to the public, and will be held online via Zoom.
ISIE Speaker Series 2025 - 2026
*NB: all times are ET
29 Sept 1 pm*
ONUR OZTURK (Columbia College)
Mussolini's Column and Beyond: The Evolution and Destruction of the 1933 Italian Pavilion Chicago.
20 Nov 1 pm
NICHOLAS CULL (USC)
Overture to an Alliance: British Propaganda at the New York World's Fair, 1939-1940
5 Dec 2 pm
DOROTEA PETRUCCI (London Met)
New York Ready:
Weaponising Italian Design Culture for the 1939 World's Fair
22 Jan 1 pm
KATHLEEN JAMES-CHAKRABORTY
(UCD)
From the Belgian Pavilion to the Belgian Friendship Building: A Remnant of New York's 1939 Fair
23 Feb 1 pm
HANNAH SIGUR (Uni NOVA de Lisboa)
Neoclassicism and National Identity: Japan, The United States and International Expositions 1862-1915
26 Mar 11 am
CRISTINA DELLA COLETTA, FILBERTO CHIABRANDO, ALESSANDRA SPREAFICO
(Turin 1911 Project)
Turin 1911: Ephemeral Architectures & Digital Technologies
22 Apr 1 pm
LUCIA COLOMBARI (Univ. Oklahoma)
Contested Spaces: Italy's Nation-Building Through World Fairs
ISIE Committee
Lisa Schrenk is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Arizona. She received a B.A. from Macalester College, a Master’s Degree in Architectural History from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin. In 2006 and again in 2012 she received the Charles A. Dana I Award for excellence in teaching, research, and service Other professional achievements include her recent book The Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright (University of Chicago Press, 2021) receiving a coveted star review from Publishers Weekly and her book Building a Century of Progress: The Architecture of Chicago’s 1933-34 World’s Fair (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) named to Choice Review’s List of Outstanding Academic Titles. She received a Fulbright-Hays award to study sustainably development in Brazil and a We the People grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her research on the Oak Park studio. In 2020 she was named AIA Arizona Community Educator of the Year, in part for initiating and serving as faculty advisor for the University of Arizona’s Women in Architecture Society and for her work as a UA Faculty Fellow. Dr. Schrenk has served on numerous professional committees, including being elected to the Board of Directors for the Society of Architectural Historians and President of the Chicago Society of Architectural Historians. She is an expert member of ICOMOS's International Scientific Committee on the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites and serves on Forbes Magazine's Architecture Advisory Board and the Faculty and Staff Council of Semester at Sea. She has participated in several NEH and East-West Center enrichment programs on Asian culture and has lectured on American expositions in China. Her extensive world travel has included visits to sites of architectural significance in over 85 countries, including while a faculty member on two around-the-world Semester at Sea voyages.
Dr. Lisa D. Schrenk
Professor of Architectural History, The University of Arizona
James’ research focuses primarily on the twentieth century and is situated at the intersection of cultural and diplomatic history. He is especially interested in the architectural production of the interwar period and its relationship to the (re)construction of national, ethnic, or civic identity. His current book project, entitled ‘Cultural Diplomacy in the Age of Fascism: The 1939 New York World’s Fair,’ explores these themes within the context of the final international exposition held before the Second World War. James received his PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2024 and taught history and international relations in the United States and England before returning to Scotland on a lectureship the following academic year. He studied for a BA in History and English at West Virginia University before completing master’s degrees in Classics and History at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge, respectively. To date, James’ work has been supported by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), American Historical Association (AHA), Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), Transatlantic Studies Association (TSA), Italian Art Society (IAS), Association for the Study of Modern Italy (ASMI), the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, and others. He is a founding member of ISIE and welcomes opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement.
Dr. James Fortuna
Visiting Scholar, Columbia University
Dr. Constanza Robles S.
Ph.D. Graduate, Boston University
Constanza is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. She received a B.A in Hispanic Literature and another in Aesthetics from Universidad Católica de Chile. She obtained a certificate in Cultural Management from the same university and an M.A. in Theory and History of Art from Universidad de Chile. Before moving to Boston with a Fulbright Scholarship, she served as Adjunct Professor at Universidad Católica, where she taught the history of modern art and cultural management. Her research focuses on Latin American art of the first half of the twentieth century, particularly on how the notions of Pan Americanism, Hispanism, and Latin Americanism are portrayed in world fairs. She is interested in how the built environment and visual culture of American pavilions articulated regional and hemispheric political, cultural, and economic alliances. She is currently writing her dissertation titled “Visualizing Alliances Through Art and Architecture: Pan Americanism, Hispanismo, and Latin Americanism in World Fairs, 1901-1929” Constanza has presented her work at the 109th CAA Annual Conference (2021), the Symposium on the History of Art Presented by The Frick Collection and The Institute of Fine Arts of New York University (2022), and ISIE’s Inaugural Symposium. She has been recently awarded a Terra Foundation Travel Grant to research the 1922 Rio de Janeiro Centennial of Independence Exposition and the Helen G. Allen Humanities Award by the Boston University Center for the Humanities. In the Spring of 2023, she will serve as a fellow at The Wolfsonian—Florida International University Museum.
Guido Cimadomo is Associate Professor in Architectural History and Composition at the Department of Art and Architecture, University of Malaga (Spain) where he teaches across history, theory and design subjects since 2010. Guido is Architect for the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and PhD (Int. hons.) for University of Seville (Spain). He is Expert member of the ICOMOS’ scientific committee CIPA for the Documentation of Architectonic Heritage, UN-Habitat UNI focal point at the University of Malaga, and member of the Research Group HUM-696 Utopia. He investigates contemporary urban transformations, with special interest in bottom up processes, tourism pressures, borderland flows and world expositions; and the documentation and cataloguing of cultural heritage, with a special focus on vernacular architecture, as an expression of collective identity.
Dr. Guido Cimadomo
Associate Professor, University of Malaga (Spain)
Charles Pappas
Senior Writer for Exhibitor magazine
Charles Pappas has covered the exposition industry for Exhibitor magazine since 2002 and every world’s fair since 2010. His publications include Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords, a probe of how world expos and trade fairs shaped history, and chapters in Expo 2020 Dubai: The Definitive Edition. Other books include One Giant Leap, a look at the inventions the space race brought us, and It’s a Bitter Little World, a revel in language of film noir. He was a consultant to Expo 2020 (and a regular feature of Expo 2020’s official podcast Inside Expo), speaker for the State Department in Dubai, and currently consults with the Expo 2027 effort in the US. His current research includes compiling information on buildings proposed but never constructed for world expos and examining Hollywood’s lost world’s fair of 1923.
César Corona
Assistant Director of Engagement at USC CPD, and CEO of ExpoMuseum.com
César Corona is Assistant Director of Engagement at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, and CEO of ExpoMuseum.com. He specializes in World Expos, public diplomacy, and governmental transparency. His research on transparency in World Expos received an award by the Mexican Federal Institute for Access to Public Information (IFAI) in 2006. Three years later, his thesis “Public Diplomacy in International Expositions: Mexico and Canada in Expo 2005 Aichi” received an award from the Center for Research on North America (CISAN) of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He holds a B.A. in International Relations from UNAM and an MPD in Public Diplomacy from the University of Southern California (USC), which he pursued as a Fulbright-Garcia Robles, CONACYT, and Rafael Osuna scholar. While at USC, he was a research intern at CPD under the supervision of Jay Wang, and a research assistant of CPD Faculty Fellow Pamela Starr in the “US-Mexico Network @ USC” in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Under a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Public Policy grant, César served as Public Diplomacy Special Advisor for the Office of Strategic Partnerships of the City of Los Angeles. Corona has also interned at the Direction General of Protocol of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Consulate of Mexico in Los Angeles, and the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE). César has worked for USAID at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, and in different capacities at Expo 1998 Lisbon, Expo 2000 Hannover, Expo 2010 Shanghai, Expo 2012 Yeosu, Expo 2015 Milan, and Expo 2020 Dubai. He has taught international relations, international communication, new media, and marketing courses at UNAM and the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM). He recently authored the “First 100 Days Memo: U.S.-Mexico Policy Recommendations for the Biden Administration,” as a Mexico Initiative Fellow of the Pacific Council on International Policy.
Ketty Iannantuono is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Radboud Institute for History & Culture, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands where she is part of the Anchoring Innovation Project (funded by the Dutch Research Council, NWO). Anchoring Innovation is a collaborative research initiative that brings together classicists to study the human factor in successful innovation, focusing on how new ideas gain acceptance by being connected to familiar elements from the past — a process known as anchoring. Ketty obtained her PhD from Radboud University (2022) with a dissertation that examined the representation of Roman emperors in provincial monuments and the ideological appropriation of these imperial images in modern times. Her research explored how visual symbols of power were transmitted, reinterpreted, and mobilized across historical contexts for political and cultural purposes. Before acquiring her PhD, she earned a BA in Cultural Heritage, and an MA and a Specialization in Classical Archaeology from the University of Bologna. She has participated in numerous international archaeological projects and held teaching appointments at Radboud University, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and the University of Amsterdam. Her teaching portfolio includes courses in Ancient History, Archaeology, Gender and the Arts, as well as supervision of BA and MA theses within the programs Tourism and Culture and EDUMaH (Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Education, Museums and Heritage). Her current research focuses on the reception of Classical antiquity in modern and contemporary exhibition culture. In particular, her project Classical Antiquity in Vitrine explores how museum displays of Graeco-Roman artifacts in the 20th and 21st centuries have contributed to the canonization of Classical antiquity as a ‘reference culture’. Drawing on critical museology and postcolonial theory, she examines how exhibitions shape public memory through processes of selection, resemanticization, and visual rhetoric. A key strand of this research investigates how world’s fairs and international expositions have functioned as spaces of cultural performance and as platforms for staging antiquity in order to articulate visions of modernity and nationhood. During her postdoctoral fellowship at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max Planck Institute) and the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) in Istanbul (2022–2023), she conducted archival research on a 1910 Italian archaeological mission to Ankara. This mission resulted in a full-scale plaster cast of the local Temple of Augustus and Roma which was exhibited at the 1911 Mostra Archeologica — part of Italy’s celebratory world’s fair marking the 50th anniversary of national unification. Her research investigated how archaeology, diplomacy, and exhibition practices intersected in early 20th-century Mediterranean geopolitics. In May 2025, she organized the international conference Antiquities in the Modern Laboratory: World Fairs and Anchoring Innovation in Antiquity at Radboud University, which brought together scholars working on the intersection of antiquity, exhibitionary culture, and the politics of historical reception.
Ketty Iannantuono
Postdoctoral Researcher, Radboud Institute for History & Culture
Dennis is an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona, pursuing a Bachelor of Architecture. His academic interests include sustainability and climate resilience, regionalism, and landscapes, as well as architectural history and theory. He enjoys analyzing historical projects through various theoretical lenses to understand new perspectives on the built environment. In 2024, his work was recognized at CAPLA’s Universal Design Awards Ceremony. Dennis contributes to ISIE by creating promotional materials and managing social media accounts, aiming to connect scholars and researchers worldwide.
Dennis Nichols
B.Arch. Student, University of Arizona CAPLA
Dr Alison de Kruiff
Course Director, Bachelor of Design, Swinburne University of Technology
Past Committee Members
