My research and teaching focus on the relational geographies of the Second World War in the Pacific in western Canada, Hawai’i, and Alaska.

In my current book project, I study the material, landscape and legal transformation of Pacific War remains into heritage sites. My research is informed by archival research, architectural drawing and photography in addition to place-based and participant-engaged methods such as landscape archaeology, gardening, and salvage at former civilian and prisoner-of-war incarceration landscapes. My project contributes to scholarly debates on public lands, national heritage, war memory, and Asian North American-Indigenous relations in the aftermath of wartime incarceration in Canada and the US.

A second project dwells on dust to study the postwar and present-day conditions of the Alaska Highway, a former military road in northern British Columbia, Yukon, and Alaska. I focus on the material and atmospheric politics of unsettled dust and consider its impacts on debates over the maintenance of bi-national roadways.

I trained as an architectural historian (UC Berkeley), urban designer (McGill), and landscape architect (Guelph/Edinburgh). Currently, I hold professional affiliations with the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals (CAHP) and am a landscape architect (non-stamp) with the British Columbia Society of Landscape Architects (BCSLA).

2026

Vickers, M and Valadares, D with Zeiderman, A; Goh, K; Hudson, P; Loyd, J; and Arbona-Homar, J on Explosivity: Following What Remains. 2025 University of Minnesota Press. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02637758261436876 

Valadares, D. Preserving Particulates: Containing Infrastructure and Fomenting Fermentation on the Alaska Highway. Perspecta. The MIT Press. 2026; (57): 19–34. https://direct.mit.edu/psct/issue/number/57

2025

Valadares, D with Elkington, K; Kushi, M; Lee Moses, K; Mei Singh, L; and Nebolon, J on Settler Militarism: World War II Hawaiʻi and the Making of U.S. Empire. 2024 Duke University Press. Antipode Online: https://antipodeonline.org/2025/07/11/settler-militarism/

Valadares, D. “Out in the Wild: Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan’s Lesbian National Parks and Services.” RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review 50, no. 2 (2025): 265–80. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48860635.

2024

Valadares, D. Lê Espiritu Gandhi, E. Jeychandran, N. and A. Murphy. 2024. Theorizing Transits: Im/mobility, Im/materiality, Im/permanence. In Verge Global Asias: Tactics and Theories for a Global Asias Praxis, edited by T. Chen and C. Eubanks. University of Hawaii Press

2023

Valadares, D. 2023. Thinking Like a Gulch: Pacific War Heritage, Settler Lands and Toxic Uncertainties in O‘ahu. Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative. Toxics Project. doi: https://doi.org/10.53965/BJTM8353

Valadares, D. 2023. Uneven Mobilities: Infrastructural Imaginaries on The Hope-Princeton Highway. The Radical History Review (147): 158-185. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10637232

Valadares, D. 2023.  Economies and Circuits of Repair: On Reparative Justice Within/Beyond the State: An Interview with Jovan Scott Lewis. Journal of Architectural Education. Special Issue: Reparations! 77 (1). doi: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10464883.2023.2165808

2022

Valadares, D. 2022. Conjuring the Commons: National Monuments as Technical Lands. In Technical Lands: A Critical Primer, edited by C. Waldheim and J. Nesbit. JOVIS Verlag.

2021

Valadares, D. 2021. Unsettling “Historic Integrity” at Honouliuli National Heritage Site, O’ahu, Hawai’i. Change Over Time 10(2): 178-182. doi: doi:10.1353/cot.2021.0008.

Prior to my appointment at UBC in July 2022, I published creative work, photography, and writing in The Funambulist Magazine: Politics of Space and Bodies, Places Journal, and The Avery Review. I also contributed chapters to edited volumes, co-authored cultural landscape assessments and made architectural drawings according to HABS/HALS Historic American Buildings and Landscapes standards.

My interdisciplinary scholarship and creative practice engages architecture, cultural geography and landscape studies, Asian American studies and preservation law. Since arriving at UBC in 2022, my work has been generously supported by:

2026, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich x Deutsches Museum
2025, Columbia GSAPP Architecture, Preservation and Planning, Detlef Mertins Lecture
2024, American Association of Geographers, Landscape Specialty Group Keynote
2023, Cornell University, Migrations Summer Institute, Asian American Studies Department
2023, Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada
2022, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada-Insight Development Grant
2022, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA)
2022, Penn State Global Asias Institute, Global Asias Summer Institute

I welcome inquiries from prospective MA and PhD Geography students interested in material, infrastructural, oceanic, architectural, and landscape histories that center diaspora, Asian-Indigenous relations, and cultural geographies of placemaking and remembrance. I am keen to support architects, designers, artists, among other creative professionals who aspire to produce experimental research outputs (research-creation or artistic-creation), alongside a scholarly thesis or dissertation.