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Zulaikha Ayub

Assistant Professor Adjunct

Trained as an architect, Zulaikha’s research is mostly concerned with the apparatuses of media, secrecy, and technology in relation to the Manhattan Project and subsequent nuclear armaments. Reading across valences of drawing, image, science, and text, and adopting methodologies from critical geography, new materialism, nuclear studies, and media archeology in addition to architecture, her aim is to more accurately portray these histories and their entanglements with the present.

Zulaikha is Co-Director and Head of Expressions for the LoPh Lab (www.lo-ph.agency), and founding member of the Graphe critical geography collective (www.geo-graphe.org). She holds a B.Arch. degree from the Cooper Union, an MDesS degree (with Distinction) from Harvard University, and is completing her Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton University entitled “Translations from Drawing to Bombing (and Other Disarrays).” She has taught graduate and undergraduate design studios, lectures, and seminars at Pratt Institute, City College of New York, Mississippi State University, Catholic University of America, and Mountainview Correctional Facility.

View Zulaikha Ayub's CV here. 

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.