My research brings cultural geography and landscape studies into conversation with architectural history. I am interested in geographies of remembrance and commemoration and my work is driven by a commitment to land stewardship and cultural placemaking. I contribute my geographical and architectural perspectives on these issues and to interdisciplinary debates in Asian North American studies, settler colonial studies, and preservation law.

I earned my PhD in Architecture: History, Theory and Society from UC Berkeley where I trained as an architectural historian. I hold professional degrees in landscape architecture and urban design and gained experience in private practice (Toronto, Canada), in government (National Park Service – Pacific West Office in San Francisco, CA) and in non-profits (National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, DC and CyArk in Oakland, CA). These roles supplemented my research interests in land stewardship, heritage landscapes, and cultural repatriation.

Since joining UBC Geography and Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) Program in 2022, I teach courses on infrastructure and labour histories, treaty education (the Numbered Treaties), and Asian migration and diaspora in post-Confederation Canada. I integrate place-based and studio-based pedagogies in my teaching and encourage student interaction with primary sources, including archives, maps, cultural belongings, oral histories, buildings, visual art and more.

Beyond the university, I engage in professional service as an advocate in the arts, culture, and heritage. Previous roles include a design jury member for the new Nunavut Inuit Heritage Centre (Iqaluit); in cultural policy with ICOMOS Canada; in public education with the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects’ Cultural Landscape Legacy Collection; and as a merit committee member for SSHRC-IDG’s Committee 03A (Fine Arts, Research-Creation).

My research centers the cultural and social geographies of the Pacific War in western Canada, Hawai’i, and Alaska. I focus on the heritage politics of preserving former civilian and prisoner-of-war incarceration landscapes, battle sites, and military roads. Given their contemporary significance as contested terrain, I study these landscapes’ competing narratives, layered memories, and contaminated legacies across three main strands:

1) PUBLIC LANDS + NATIONAL MONUMENTS
My book manuscript, Unlikely Antiquities: Pacific War Sites as Public Lands, reframes the Antiquities Act of 1906 as a tool for war commemoration. Drawing on archival research, landscape archaeology, and material analysis, the book shows how Pacific War sites are transformed into national monuments using the act’s executive powers. Unlikely Antiquities contributes to debates on military surplus and land conversion; speaks to conversations on stewardship and corporate philanthropy at US public lands; and intervenes in discussions on Indigenous-Asian settler relations at former wartime incarceration sites.

2) PARTICULATE GEOGRAPHIES
A second project dwells on dust to study the ALCAN or Alaska Highway, a former military road built by the U.S. Army Corps, that traverses northern British Columbia, Yukon, and Alaska. Using research-creation methods, I consider the atmospheric and material politics of unsettled dust along this civilian route in northwestern Canada. This strand of research contributes to scholarly conversations in geography on volumetric and elemental space and in architectural history on microhistories, consumer culture, and infrastructural repair.

3) FORGOTTEN FRONTS
A final project on the cultural geographies of the Pacific War centers civilian and official war art by an Indigenous photographer, women painters, captured prisoners-of-war and civilian incarcerees alongside official war artists namely E.J. Hughes, A.Y. Jackson, H.G. Glyde among others in northwestern Canada, Alaska and Hawai’i. This project contributes to debates on war propaganda, state-led nationalism, and anti-war critique.

2026

Bosworth, K and Morinville, C with Anthias, P, Braun, B, Kneas, D, Pérez, MA, Valadares, D, and Marston, A on Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia. 2024. Duke University Press. Political Geography. 2026. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103590

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.

Valadares, D. “The 1966 Motorific Alcan Highway Torture Track” Playing Inside Series. October 2025. NICHE:
Network in Canadian History and Environment [Available] https://niche-canada.org/2025/10/10/the1966
motorific-alcan-highway-torture-track/

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 scholarship and creative practice have been nurtured by:

2026 Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich x Deutsches Museum

2025 Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), Detlef Mertins Lecture

2024 American Association of Geographers (AAG), Landscape Specialty Group, Keynote Lecture

2023 Migrations Summer Institute, Cornell Asian American Studies Program

2023 Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada, Phyllis Lambert Prize

2022 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant

2022 Canadian Centre for Architecture Research Fellowship

2022 Global Asia(s) Summer Institute at PennState

I welcome inquiries from prospective MA and PhD Geography students whose research interests align with my projects and methods. I am keen to support emerging scholars in geography and allied spatial disciplines who are interested in creative and experimental approaches to geographical knowledge production, particularly architects, designers, and artists.

My current and former students are producing research-creation or artistic-creation outputs, alongside a written thesis or dissertation, on topics that range from historic mining landscapes, salvaged archives, and post-wildfire rural community building in British Columbia.