Alina Payne is Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She was trained as an architect (BArch, McGill University) and received MA and PhD degrees in art/architecture history (University of Toronto). She is the author of The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance (1999; Hitchcock Prize, 2000), Modern Architecture and the Rise of a Theory of Objects (forthcoming), editor of  Displacements. Architecture and the Other Side of the Known (2000) and co-editor of Antiquity and Its Interpreters (2000). She is currently researching her next book on Renaissance architecture and materiality and preparing edited volumes on Vision and Its Instruments, Portable Archaeology and the Poetics of Influence: Croatia and the Mediterranean, and Urban Artefacts: Triumphal Arches and the paragone between the Arts arising from a series of workshops/seminars she organized 2006-09. She has published numerous articles on Renaissance and modern architecture, on historiography and artistic theory. Most recently she was awarded the Max Planck and Alexander von Humboldt Prize in the Humanities (2006). 

Alina Payne teaches courses on Early Modern and Modern European architecture. She has taught at Oberlin College (1990-91) and University of Toronto (1991-2003) and she has held visiting appointments at the GSD, Harvard University (1999/00), Villa I Tatti, Florence (2004/5), Kunsthistorisches/ Max Planck Institut Florence (2007), Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris (2008) and Hertziana/ Max Planck Institute Rome (2008/9). She has served on the Board of Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians and as Book Review Editor of the Journal of  the Society of Architectural Historians and serves currently on the editorial boards of several international journals (Res. Journal of  Aesthetics and Anthropology, Journal of Historiography).

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