Alice T. Friedman is professor of American art at Wellesley College, where she focuses on modern architecture and design history. Her books include House and Household in Elizabethan England (1989), Women and the Making of the Modern House (1998), and American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (2010).

Friedman is writing a book about privacy, surveillance, and queer identities called Poker Faces/Private Spaces, which “examines a handful of houses and other buildings like gay bars and social clubs dating from the 1900 to the present and highlights the ways in which architectural styles and planning strategies both reveal and conceal the identities and activities of users and makers. I’m very interested in walls, screens, membranes, and layers, and in the processes of constructing meaning through ‘readings’ and projections onto these surfaces. I’m also interested in interiors and interiority in design and literature.”