Dr Junia Cambraia Mortimer

Urban-Nature Archives: Spatial Practices of Futurity in Brazilian Amazonia

Funding period: 8 September 2025 – 8 June 2026
Type of funding: International Fellowship

Junia Mortimer is an architectural and urban historian who works on the crossways of visual culture, social history of architecture and urban studies, focusing on spatial and building practices within photographic archives. She is currently working as an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the Federal University of Minas Gerais and is also faculty of the Graduate Programme in Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Bahia. She is a self-taught photographer and holds a Bachelor’s in Architecture and Urbanism (UFMG, 2007), a Master’s in Arts and Humanities (Erasmus Mundus Scholarship/UPVD, 2010) and a PhD in Architecture (NPGAU/UFMG, 2015), with a doctoral internship at the Cooper Union, in NYC. She was a postdoctoral fellow at UFMG in 2019, and a visiting fellow at Harvard University in 2023. 

She is the author of the books Arquiteturas do Olhar (2017) and Salvador anos 70 (2024), and co-organized the books Entre imagem e escrita (2020) and Desvios da Arquitetura (2023). She also wrote a number of papers for scientific journals, such as “Poetics of Archives as Urban Practices” (2020), and curated exhibitions, such as Urbanos Arquivos (2023) in Salvador. Her work is dedicated to urban studies and the history and theory of architecture, with an emphasis on visual culture through photographic archives. She is on the coordination team of the Laboratory of Experiments on Image and Architecture (LEIA) and of the research group Archives, Sources and Narratives. 

As a USF International Fellow, she will spend nine months at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield (UK), under the mentorship of professors Dr Beth Perry and Dr AbdouMaliq Simone, working on visuality, urbanisation and environmental history. She will focus on the data collected from her research on photographic archives, more specifically on the personal collection of Dr Roberto Luís Monte-Mór, who registered various transformations in the Brazilian Amazon since the 1980s. These images, juxtaposed with other documents, constitute ‘urban-nature archives’ that can bring out ways of seeing that restore certain practices not as ruins of vernacular modes of life that have been extinguished but rather as futurity, following Fred Moten, that present alternative ways for facing the Anthropocene/Capitalocene and the environmental crisis. 

Profile at Academia | Profile at LATTES | juniamortimer@ufmg.br