Faculty

Profile

Dr. Denise L. Lim is a Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar and incoming Assistant Professor of Black Material and Visual Cultures in the Art and Design History and Theory (ADHT) program at The New School's Parsons School of Design. Previous to The New School, Denise co-curated the Contemporary Art/South Africa exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2014 and has undertaken curation, research, and teaching within Yale’s notable African art collection. As a Yale GSAS Alumni Fellow (2020-21), she taught a cross-listed course entitled, "Space, Time, and the African City," and served as a strategic initiatives fellow at the Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage where she implemented a COVID-19 impact study of African cultural heritage institutions. Later, Denise was a BIPOC curatorial postdoctoral fellow (2021-22) at Stanford University Archaeology Collections (SUAC) where she researched SUAC’s African Collections, taught two courses entitled, "The African Archive Beyond Colonization" and "Museum Cultures: Exhibiting the African Imaginary," and co-curated the exhibition, Reimagining African Borders Through Cultural Objects, featuring objects from Nubian Egypt, Ethiopia, the Sudan, and South Sudan.

Denise was recently awarded the NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication to convert her doctoral research into an interactive website that explores the social history, architectural design, and material or visual cultures of a residential tower in Johannesburg, South Africa called Ponte City. Denise lived in Johannesburg from 2017-19 and worked with South African artist Mikhael Subotzky to research his and Patrick Waterhouse's Ponte City (2014) archive. She photographed and catalogued over 800 found objects that the two artists collected from Ponte's abandoned apartments when changing owners had attempted to renovate the residence, forcibly evicting tenants from their homes in 2008 to make way for wealthier clients. Denise recontextualized these artifacts with speculative drawings produced by a team of architectural researchers and designers at the Johannesburg-based studios of Counterspace and brickstreet, as well as other literary, material, visual, and sonic artifacts.

As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Denise collaborated with Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra (Ph.D student in Religious Studies and Architecture, Yale University) and South African architects Zakiyyah Haffejee and Adam Osman of brickstreet studio to publish a journal article that was a spatial commemoration to the radical friendship between Japanese American activist, Yuri Kochiyama, and Black nationalist leader El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz/Malcolm X. This collaborative work has been revised as a chapter for the forthcoming book anthology, Mapping Malcolm, edited by Najha Zigbi-Johnson for Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. 

Degrees Held

Ph.D in Sociology, Yale University

M.A. in African Studies, Yale University

B.A. in English and Sociology, Bryn Mawr College

Recent Publications

Lim, Denise and Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra. 2024. “Architecting Friendship: A Spatial Commemoration to Yuri Kochiyama and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz/Malcolm X” in Mapping Malcolm edited by Najha Zigbi-Johnson. New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.

—2023. “Architecting Friendship: A Spatial Commemoration to Yuri Kochiyama and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz/Malcolm X.” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 8(1-2): 196-206.

Lim, Denise L. 2023. Review of Wake Up! This Is Joburg by Tanya Zack and Mark Lewis. Urban Studies 00(0):1-3.

Lim, Denise L and Sonya Solanki. 2023. Reclaiming African Heritage for the Post-COVID Era. New Haven: Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage.

Lim, Denise L. 2022. “Remnants of Apartheid in Ponte City, Johannesburg.” Pp. 189-210 in The Politics of Design: Privilege and Prejudice in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia & South Africa, edited by Federico Freschi, Farieda Nazier, and Jane Venis. Dunedin: Otago Press. 

—2021. “Prototyping New Possibilities: Digital Architectures for the Preservation of African Cultural Heritage.” Pp. 28-31 in Spectral Hauntings: Spaces of the Hyperreal in Post-Colonial Egypt, edited by Huda Tayob, Sarah de Villiers, and Naadira Patel. Johannesburg: University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture.

Lim, Denise, and Sumayya Vally. 2021. “Diasporic Entanglements.” Pp. 107-30 in Conversations Across Place: Reckoning with an Entangled World, edited by Nicola Brandt and Frances Whorrall-Campbell, 107-30. Berlin: The Green Box. 

—2018. “What the Landscape Recalls: Articulating Scales of Violence in Landscape Trauma in Namibia.” ART AFRICA, February 8. (http://artafricamagazine.org/20754-2/).

—2018. “Quiet Images of the Zionist Christian Church.” City Press, July 8. (https://www.w24.co.za/Entertainment/Arts/quiet-images-of-the-zionist-christian-church-20180708).

Awards And Honors

NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication, January - August 2024

Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence Postdoctoral Fellowship, July 2022 to July 2024

BIPOC Curatorial Postdoctoral Fellowship, Stanford University Archaeology Collections, May 2021 - August 2022

Yale GSAS Alumni Fellowship, Yale University, August 2020 - April 2021

Macmillan International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Yale University, August 2018 - August 2019

Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, October 2017 - August 2018

Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, August 2013 - May 2014