Shelley Hornstein is the Walter L. Gordon Fellow and Associate Professor of Architectural History & Visual Culture. She is published widely on the examination of place and spatial politics in architectural and urban sites. Some of the themes she is exploring are "starchitecture," Jewish topographies, architectural tourism, and department stores, malls and streetscapes of fashion. Her edited books include: Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art (McGill-University Press, 2000); Image and Remembrance: Representation and The Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2002), and Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust (NYU Press, 2003). Elsewhere, her work appears in several anthologies and scholarly journals. She was Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociale, Paris, and at the University of Bologna, and has been invited to speak at universities and public events at many international venues.

She is currently completing a book entitled Losing Site: Architecture and Places, Lost and Found and preparing another: Romancing the Stone: Architectural Tourisms and our Fascination with Buildings and Places. As Executive Director and Co-Founder of www.mosaica.ca, she has co-developed, along with Carol Zemel and Reesa Greenberg, the first online contemporary space devoted to Jewish culture, virtual space and diaspora. The recipient of many prestigious awards, she is working with one to coordinate linkages on The City in the New Millennium: An International and Comparative perspective with colleagues at the City Institute at York University, the University of Bologna International Center for Civic Engagement, the Freie Universitat Berlin, (JFK Institute for North American Studies) and the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Technical University of Berlin.

A graduate of the University des Sciences Humaines, Strasbourg, France, Professor Hornstein has taught at York University since 1985. Her courses include "Memory and Place," "Paris as Modernist Dream," "The Celluloid City," "No Place like Home," and "The Metropolis Revisited." Prior to York University, she taught at Concordia and Laval Universities. She is a member of York's graduate programs in Art History, Culture and Communications, and Social and Political Thought. She has served as Associate Dean, Co-Director of the Centre for Feminist Research, and twice Chair of Department of Fine Arts, Atkinson College.