José Lira (PD and Ph.D. University of São Paulo) is a professor at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP). He is currently the Director of USP's Maria Antonia Cultural Center. He was a research affiliate of the Brazilian National Council of Research from 1999 to 2014, and directed USP's Center for Cultural Preservation from 2010 to 2014. His Ph.D. dissertation was about the connections between housing debates, urban culture and architectural and planning discourses in Recife, Brazil, in the first half of 20th Century and his Habilitation Thesis focused on the life and work of Ukrainian avant-garde architect Gregori Warchachik (1896-1972) in Brazil, from the 1920s to the 1950s. Lira has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris - Malaquais. He has authored ‘O visível e o invísivel na arquitetura brasileira/ The visible and the invisible in Brazilian architecture’ (DBA, 2017), and ‘Warchavchik: Fraturas da Vanguarda’ (Cosac & Naify, 2011); and has co-edited several other books. Lira has published regularly in different collective books and journals around architectural and planning historiography and criticism; modernism, architecture and the city; Brazilian social thinking; housing history; architecture's material production; and ethnicity, gender and sexuality in architecture and urbanism. While at Princeton Lira will co-teach a graduate-level ARC/LAS seminar with Professor Beatriz Colomina from the School of Architecture.