Richard Nisa

Richard Nisa is Associate Dean of Carnegie Mellon University's Integrative Design, Arts, and Technology (IDeATe) program and its Program Lead in Sustainability. He is also an affiliated faculty member at Carnegie Mellon Architecture, where he teaches courses on ethics, urbanism, and infrastructural history and theory.

Nisa's research explores the intersections of architecture, technology and power in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His book project, "The Global Capture Chain: Infrastructures of U.S.-Managed Military Detainment from Truman to Trump" (under review), investigates the tensions between intimate battlefield encounters and expansive transnational systems — from international law to automation to low-cost air travel — that underpin U.S. military-carcerality. His work has appeared in venues such as the "Journal of Historical Geography," "Radical History Review," and the edited volume "Algorithmic Life: Calculative Devices in the Age of Big Data."

An award-winning teacher, he is committed to public-facing and transformative pedagogies. His teaching experience ranges from leading courses on the history of mass surveillance inside three New Jersey prisons to co-teaching a course on the political economy of housing with that state’s former governor. Nisa earned a Ph.D. in geography from Rutgers University and a BArch from the Syracuse University School of Architecture.